(apologies for cross-posting, this is relevant to both lists)
Hi all,
Recently the issue of reporting some stats back to the project has
come up [1] and as this is a contentious issue, I'd thought I'd bring
it up on the lists, to get feedback.
Anonymous stat reporting isn't new (I can't recall how long popcon has
been in Debian, but it's a while) and provides valuable data to the
developers about how to prioritize workload. Against that, there is
always privacy concern to be handled, which is what makes this a
treacherous area.
What follows are just my thoughts, to start the discussion:
It seems to me that if we have:
- opt-in
- anonymised
- aggregated
data, then privacy concerns should be mitigated. The opt-in is
especially important; I'd even say it needs to be more effort than a
Setting, and probably something like enabling a cronjob. For
anonymising, whatever we set up to receive incoming stats would drop
things like IP address immediately, and just add the useful data to a
store.
For data, I can see uses for:
- Foreman version
- Proxy version
- Plugins enabled and versions
- Compute resources enabled
Basically, all the stuff on the About page :). For an example psuedo-json:
{'stats':
"foreman_version": "1.9.2",
"proxy_versions": ["1.9.2","1.8.4"],
"compute_resources": ["libvirt","ec2"]
"plugins": {
"discovery": "4.0.0"
}
}
We might also want to look at (a) proxy plugins, and (b) hammer
plugins, but that could be tricky.
Obviously all this would be developed in the open (PRs to foreman-core
for sending, foreman-infra for the reciever). I'd also like to display
the current data via something (possibly on the website or a custom
redmine plugin) - if it's properly anonymised, then we can share it.
We'd like to know your thoughts!
Greg