Telemetry

This document presents an overview of the telemetry Firezone collects from your self-hosted instance and how to disable it.

Why Firezone collects telemetry

We rely on telemetry to prioritize our roadmap and optimize the engineering resources we have to make Firezone better for everyone.

The telemetry we collect aims to answer the following questions:

  • How many people install, use, and stop using Firezone?
  • What features are most valuable, and which ones don’t see any use?
  • What functionality needs the most improvement?
  • When something breaks, why did it break, and how can we prevent it from happening in the future?

How we collect telemetry

There are three main places where telemetry is collected in Firezone:

  1. Package telemetry. Includes events such as install, uninstall, and upgrade.
  2. CLI telemetry from firezone-ctl commands.
  3. Product telemetry associated with the Web portal.

In each of these three contexts, we capture the minimum amount of data necessary to answer the questions in the section above.

Admin emails are collected only if you explicitly opt-in to product updates. Otherwise, personally-identifiable information is never collected.

We store telemetry in PostHog only accessible by the Firezone team. Here is an example of a telemetry event that is sent from your instance of Firezone to our telemetry server:

{
  "id": "0182272d-0b88-0000-d419-7b9a413713f1",
  "timestamp": "2022-07-22T18:30:39.748000+00:00",
  "event": "fz_http_started",
  "distinct_id": "1ec2e794-1c3e-43fc-a78f-1db6d1a37f54",
  "properties": {
    "$geoip_city_name": "Ashburn",
    "$geoip_continent_code": "NA",
    "$geoip_continent_name": "North America",
    "$geoip_country_code": "US",
    "$geoip_country_name": "United States",
    "$geoip_latitude": 39.0469,
    "$geoip_longitude": -77.4903,
    "$geoip_postal_code": "20149",
    "$geoip_subdivision_1_code": "VA",
    "$geoip_subdivision_1_name": "Virginia",
    "$geoip_time_zone": "America/New_York",
    "$ip": "52.200.241.107",
    "$plugins_deferred": [],
    "$plugins_failed": [],
    "$plugins_succeeded": ["GeoIP (3)"],
    "distinct_id": "1zc2e794-1c3e-43fc-a78f-1db6d1a37f54",
    "fqdn": "awsdemo.firezone.dev",
    "kernel_version": "linux 5.13.0",
    "version": "0.4.6"
  },
  "elements_chain": ""
}

How to disable telemetry

We rely on product analytics to make Firezone better for everyone. Leaving telemetry enabled is the single most valuable contribution you can make to Firezone’s development. That said, we understand some users have higher privacy or security requirements and would prefer to disable telemetry altogether. If that’s you, keep reading.

Telemetry is enabled by default. To completely disable product telemetry:

Set the TELEMETRY_ENABLED environment variable to false and restart the firezone container.