Telemetry (community statistics) about MeshCentral. Data would be anonymized, and data sharing could be disabled.

[marclaporte]

It would be interesting to have more data about how MeshCentral is used. This was discussed at the December 2024 community meeting: https://github.com/Ylianst/MeshCentral/wiki/Community-Monthly-Meetings. Recording will be here: https://videos.evoludata.com/

How would this be useful? To know what features are used and help us decide when we can remove legacy code. Ex.: We added support for Bootstrap themes: #6333 and I wrote in the issue: "In a few years, when almost everyone is using the Bootstrap themes, for a major version, we can remove non-Bootstrap themes (We will rediscuss this as a community in a few years)". How will we know the time is right? If we had telemetry, and the data showed that 96% of the community is using Bootstrap, it will be easy to justify removing the legacy code.

Related links:

• https://github.com/open-telemetry
• SE Radio 556: Alex Boten on Open Telemetry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4s_-T6-ViU

Other Open Source projects doing telemetry:

• https://www.meilisearch.com/docs/learn/resources/telemetry
• https://manual.manticoresearch.com/Telemetry

[si458]

so ive looked into this the is a number of ways we can achieve this

we can go like traefik does, and just POST to a central server with anonymous data like OS version, node version, etc
and then we have to write a backend to store data and show graphs etc
https://github.com/traefik/traefik/blob/master/pkg/collector/collector.go

OR

we could use something like opentelemetry which is a standard for like microservices
and then use something like prometheus and grafana to create graphs etc
https://opentelemetry.io/docs/languages/js/getting-started/nodejs/
https://opentelemetry.io/docs/languages/js/exporters/#usage-with-nodejs

one other good thing is IF we used say the promethus exporter from opentelemetry,
we can kill 2 birds with 1 stone, by submitting annoymous stats to ourselves
BUT also offer a prometheus /metrics endpoint on your meshcentral server
this will then allow admins of meshcentral server to use there own prometheus instance
to monitor meshcentral like number of amt devices, connected device count, etc!