Anonymous Telemetry

[markphelps]

It's finally time that I need to start collecting some very anonymous, very basic telemetry to better understand how many people are using Flipt in order to help drive future work.

Here is the output of what the telemetry payload looks like on the analytics service side:

{
  "anonymousId": "4c3b7faf-3f43-4082-b5e2-4446a247fe1b",
  "event": "flipt.ping",
  "integrations": {},
  "messageId": "8bd98d39-8dd4-483c-9844-76b958b2285e",
  "originalTimestamp": "2022-04-04T13:29:20.398139235Z",
  "properties": {
    "flipt": {
      "version": "1.7.0"
    },
    "uuid": "4c3b7faf-3f43-4082-b5e2-4446a247fe1b",
    "version": "1.0"
  },
  "receivedAt": "2022-04-04T13:29:25.890Z",
  "sentAt": "2022-04-04T13:29:25.417Z",
  "timestamp": "2022-04-04T13:29:20.871Z",
  "type": "track",
  "writeKey": "{REDACTED}"
}

Note there is no identifiable information not even an IP address, just a unique ID that gets created and stored on every host that lives at the new meta.StateDirectory location in a file called telemetry.json.

The StateDirectory can be set in the config file or by setting FLIPT_META_STATE_DIRECTORY to a string. It defaults to the value of os.UserConfigDir() or $HOME/.config for *nix systems.

Here's an example of the contents of telemetry.json:

{
  "version": "1.0", # the version of the telemetry data, not Flipt itself
  "uuid": "1545d8a8-7a66-4d8d-a158-0a1c576c68a6",
  "lastTimestamp": "2022-04-06T01:01:51Z"
}

This data is sent every 4 hours per host.

Telemetry can be disabled completely by setting meta.TelmetryEnabled to false in the config file or by setting the FLIPT_META_TELEMETRY_ENABLED env var to false