Anonymous telemetry events

By default, Netdata collects anonymous usage information from the open-source monitoring agent. For agent events like start, stop, crash, etc. we use our own cloud function in GCP. For frontend telemetry (page views etc.) on the agent dashboard itself, we use the open-source product analytics platform PostHog.

We are strongly committed to your data privacy.

We use the statistics gathered from this information for two purposes:

1. Quality assurance, to help us understand if Netdata behaves as expected, and to help us classify repeated issues with certain distributions or environments.

2. Usage statistics, to help us interpret how people use the Netdata agent in real-world environments, and to help us identify how our development/design decisions influence the community.

Netdata collects usage information via two different channels:

• Agent dashboard: We use the PostHog JavaScript integration (with sensitive event attributes overwritten to be anonymized) to send product usage events when you access an Agent's dashboard.
• Agent backend: The netdata daemon executes the anonymous-statistics.sh script when Netdata starts, stops cleanly, or fails.

You can opt-out from sending anonymous statistics to Netdata through three different opt-out mechanisms.

Agent Dashboard - PostHog JavaScript

When you kick off an Agent dashboard session by visiting http://NODE:19999, Netdata initializes a PostHog session and masks various event attributes.

Note: You can see the relevant code in the dashboard repository where the window.posthog.register() call is made.

window.posthog.register({
    distinct_id: machineGuid,
    $ip: "127.0.0.1",
    $current_url: "agent dashboard",
    $pathname: "netdata-dashboard",
    $host: "dashboard.netdata.io",
})

In the above snippet a Netdata PostHog session is initialized and the ip, current_url, pathname and host attributes are set to constant values for all events that may be sent during the session. This way, information like the IP or hostname of the Agent will not be sent as part of the product usage event data.

We have configured the dashboard to trigger the PostHog JavaScript code only when the variable anonymous_statistics is true. The value of this variable is controlled via the opt-out mechanism.

Agent Backend - Anonymous Statistics Script

Every time the daemon is started or stopped and every time a fatal condition is encountered, Netdata uses the anonymous statistics script to collect system information and send it to the Netdata telemetry cloud function via a http call. The information collected for all events is:

• Netdata version
• OS name, version, id, id_like
• Kernel name, version, architecture
• Virtualization technology
• Containerization technology

Furthermore, the FATAL event sends the Netdata process and thread name, along with the source code function, source code filename and source code line number of the fatal error.

Starting with v1.21, we additionally collect information about:

• Failures to build the dependencies required to use Cloud features.
• Unavailability of Cloud features in an agent.
• Failures to connect to the Cloud in case the connection process has been completed. This includes error codes to inform the Netdata team about the reason why the connection failed.

To see exactly what and how is collected, you can review the script template daemon/anonymous-statistics.sh.in. The template is converted to a bash script called anonymous-statistics.sh, installed under the Netdata plugins directory, which is usually /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d.

Opt-out

You can opt-out from sending anonymous statistics to Netdata through three different opt-out mechanisms:

Create a file called .opt-out-from-anonymous-statistics. This empty file, stored in your Netdata configuration directory (usually /etc/netdata), immediately stops the statistics script from running, and works with any type of installation, including manual, offline, and macOS installations. Create the file by running touch .opt-out-from-anonymous-statistics from your Netdata configuration directory.

Pass the option --disable-telemetry to any of the installer scripts in the installation docs. You can append this option during the initial installation or a manual update. You can also export the environment variable DISABLE_TELEMETRY with a non-zero or non-empty value (e.g.,: export DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1).

When using Docker, set your DISABLE_TELEMETRY environment variable to 1. You can set this variable with the following command: export DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1. When creating a container using Netdata's Docker image for the first time, this variable will disable the anonymous statistics script inside the container.

Each of these opt-out processes does the following:

• Prevents the daemon from executing the anonymous statistics script.
• Forces the anonymous statistics script to exit immediately.
• Stops the PostHog JavaScript snippet, which remains on the dashboard, from firing and sending any data to the Netdata PostHog.