Telemetry

When the telemetry is enabled, TiDB, TiUP and TiDB Dashboard collect usage information and share the information with PingCAP to help understand how to improve the product. For example, this usage information helps prioritize new features.

What is shared?

The following sections describe the shared usage information in detail for each component. The usage details that get shared might change over time. These changes (if any) will be announced in release notes.

TiDB

When the telemetry collection feature is enabled in TiDB, the TiDB cluster collects usage details on a 6-hour basis. These usage details include but are not limited to:

• A randomly generated telemetry ID.
• Deployment characteristics, such as the size of hardware (CPU, memory, disk), TiDB components versions, OS name.
• The status of query requests in the system, such as the number of query requests and the duration.
• Component usage, for example, whether the Async Commit feature is in use or not.
• Pseudonymized IP address of the TiDB telemetry data sender.

To view the full content of the usage information shared to PingCAP, execute the following SQL statement:

ADMIN SHOW TELEMETRY;

TiDB Dashboard

When the telemetry collection feature is enabled for TiDB Dashboard, usage details of the TiDB Dashboard web UI will be shared, including (but not limited to):

• A randomly generated telemetry ID.
• User operation information, such as the name of the TiDB Dashboard web page accessed by the user.
• Browser and OS information, such as browser name, OS name, and screen resolution.

To view the full content of the usage information shared to PingCAP, use the Network Activity Inspector of Chrome DevTools or the Network Monitor of Firefox Developer Tools.

TiUP

When the telemetry collection feature is enabled in TiUP, usage details of TiUP will be shared, including (but not limited to):

• A randomly generated telemetry ID.
• Execution status of TiUP commands, such as whether the execution is successful and the execution duration.
• Deployment characteristics, such as the size of hardware, TiDB components versions, and deployment configuration names that have been modified.

To view the full content of the usage information shared to PingCAP, set the TIUP_CLUSTER_DEBUG=enable environment variable when executing the TiUP command. For example:

TIUP_CLUSTER_DEBUG=enable tiup cluster list

TiSpark

When the telemetry collection feature is enabled for TiSpark, the Spark module will share the usage details of TiSpark, including (but not limited to):

• A randomly generated telemetry ID.
• Some configuration information of TiSpark, such as the read engine and whether streaming read is enabled.
• Cluster deployment information, such as the machine hardware information, OS information, and component version number of the node where TiSpark is located.

You can view TiSpark usage information that is collected in Spark logs. You can set the Spark log level to INFO or lower, for example:

cat {spark.log} | grep Telemetry report | tail -n 1

Disable telemetry

Disable TiDB telemetry at deployment

When the telemetry is enabled in existing TiDB clusters, you can configure enable-telemetry = false on each TiDB instance to disable the TiDB telemetry collection on that instance, which does not take effect until you restart the cluster.

Detailed steps to disable telemetry in different deployment tools are listed below.

enable-telemetry = false

enable-telemetry = false

tiup playground --db.config tidb_config.toml

server_configs:
  tidb:
    enable-telemetry: false

Disable TiDB telemetry for deployed TiDB clusters

In existing TiDB clusters, you can also modify the system variable tidb_enable_telemetry to dynamically disable the TiDB telemetry collection:

SET GLOBAL tidb_enable_telemetry = 0;

Disable TiDB Dashboard telemetry

Configure dashboard.enable-telemetry = false to disable the TiDB Dashboard telemetry collection on all PD instances. You need to restart the running clusters for the configuration to take effect.

Detailed steps to disable telemetry for different deployment tools are listed below.

[dashboard]
enable-telemetry = false

[dashboard]
enable-telemetry = false

tiup playground --pd.config pd_config.toml

server_configs:
  pd:
    dashboard.enable-telemetry: false

Disable TiUP telemetry

To disable the TiUP telemetry collection, execute the following command:

tiup telemetry disable

Check telemetry status

For TiDB telemetry, execute the following SQL statement to check the telemetry status:

ADMIN SHOW TELEMETRY;

If the DATA_PREVIEW column in the execution result is empty, TiDB telemetry is disabled. If not, TiDB telemetry is enabled. You can also check when the usage information was shared previously according to the LAST_STATUS column and whether the sharing was successful or not.

For TiUP telemetry, execute the following command to check the telemetry status:

tiup telemetry status

Compliance

To meet compliance requirements in different countries or regions, the usage information is sent to servers located in different countries according to the IP address of the sender machine:

• For IP addresses from the Chinese mainland, usage information is sent to and stored on cloud servers in the Chinese mainland.
• For IP addresses from outside of the Chinese mainland, usage information is sent to and stored on cloud servers in the US.

See PingCAP Privacy Policy for details.