Submitting usage telemetry

If enabled, Puppet Server's dropsonde tool collects usage data for public Forge content and submits collected information to Puppet development. This data helps Puppet development to prioritize more useful module work and to improve Forge search quality.

All data collected is fully aggregated before anyone can access it. After aggregation, it is available publicly for the benefit of the Puppet community. You can access public data at Puppet's BigQuery public database.

You can configure dropsonde to enable or disable certain metrics according to your organization's policies or preferences. For more information on how to do this, visit dropsonde's documentation.

Configuring dropsonde in puppetserver.conf

Find the following section in your puppetserver.conf file. If the section is not present, you may add it manually:

# settings related to submitting module metrics via Dropsonde
dropsonde: {
     #enabled: false
	
    # How long, in seconds, to wait between dropsonde submissions
    # Defaults to one week.
    # interval: 604800
}

To enable telemetry collection, uncomment the enabled setting and update it to true.

The interval setting defines how long, in seconds, Puppet Server waits between telemetry submissions if enabled. The default is 604800 (one week).

Dropsonde terminal commands

The terminal command puppetserver dropsonde list lists all the loaded metrics plugins and describes what they do.

To see exactly what data is collected in a readable format, run puppetserver dropsonde preview in the terminal.

Note: use --format=json if you want to use this data for your own tooling.

For more information on installating and configuring dropsonde, visit its documentation.