Anonymized Usage Analytics

To help us better understand how DVC is used and improve it, DVC captures and reports anonymized usage statistics. You will be notified the first time you run dvc init.

Motivation

Analytics help us to decide on how best to design future features and prioritize current work. Anonymous aggregates of user analytics allow us to prioritize fixes and improvements based on how, where and when people use DVC. For example:

If reflinks (depends on a file system type) are supported for most users, we can keep cache protected mode off by default (see dvc unprotect).
Collecting OS information and the way DVC was installed allows us to decide which OS platforms and versions to support and prioritize.
If usage of some command is negligible small it makes us think about issues with a command or documentation.

Retention period

User and event data have a 14 month retention period.

What

DVC's analytics record the following information per event:

The DVC version e.g. 0.82.0
Whether DVC was installed from a binary release
Operating system information, e.g. Ubuntu Linux 14.04
Whether the project uses Git
Command type e.g. CmdDataPull
Command return code e.g. 1
A random user ID (e.g. 8ca59a29-ddd9-4247-992a-9b4775732aad), generated with uuid
For CI jobs, a random ID per repo (e.g. 8ca59a29-ddd9-4247-992a-9b4775732aad), generated with uuid

This does not allow us to track individual users but does enable us to accurately measure user counts vs. event counts.

Implementation

The code is viewable in analytics.py. They are done in a separate background process and fail fast to avoid delaying any execution. They will fail immediately and silently if you have no network connection.

DVC's analytics are sent through DVC's proxy to Google Analytics over HTTPS.

Opting out

DVC analytics help the entire community, so leaving it on is appreciated. However, if you want to opt out of DVC's analytics, you can disable it via dvc config command (or setting core.analytics manually):

$ dvc config core.analytics false

This will disable it for the project. Alternatively, you can use the --global or --system options of dvc config to disable analytics for the active user or for everyone in the system, respectively.