📣 Community consultation time: Telemetry

[teocomi (Matteo Cominetti)]

Hello all!
Cross posting from this Slack thread:

@dimitrie

We need some sort of analytics for speckle, in order to be able to prioritize development and understand usage a bit more. Currently, the only number we’ve got is the total amount of installer downloads from the github api, but we don’t know how much each individual plugin is used or… anything else. With @teocomi we’ve come up with the following things we’d like to track anonymously (no personally identifiable information of any kind):

• number of users
• number of server deployments
• number of streams created & received
• number of installs per client (revit/dynamo/grasshopper&rhino/blender/etc).
  Of course, you’ll be able to disable any kind of telemetry from the clients and/or server; but first we’d like to know how you feel about all this. This would help the project quite a bit, and give us speckle some extra bargaining power that it currently lacks. Hope to hear from y’all!
  As an extra, please share this as widely as possible, as we’d like this to be a real conversation

[dimitrie]

Archiving the slack discussion here, before it disappears:

As an update on what’s the status of this:

We’ve decided to use a self-hosted solution, Countly, so we can be sure data won’t go anywhere else. Using Google et. al might have been better or easier, but we’re not cool with their ethics as of recent.

We are now slowly rolling this out. The latest server version (1.8.0) is “telemetrified”. .NET based clients will follow this week.

As a reminder, all data is anonymous based on a randomly generated machineId that is generated using the following libraries:

• .NET GitHub - MatthewKing/DeviceId: A simple library providing functionality to generate a 'device ID' that can be used to uniquely identify a computer.
• Node node-machine-id - npm