I built something like this for products at Sun Microsystems. We embedded into nearly everything we built:
The Java Runtime Environment Open Office Solaris MySQL Even things like Server LOMs (the list goes on) By default, when each of these products installed/first run, it would try to bring the user into the program. It was always possible to opt out, but we really worked to get people to not opt out. We got shockingly HUGE piles of data (literally from millions of installed product instances). We didn't get any complaints (EVER) in the years we ran this program. It was hugely useful to the product teams. BTW, we didn't even make this data anonymous. You could obviously choose to be anonymous, but if people want to give their names/companies then why not let them? You'd be surprised how many people wouldn't mind. -Steve On 11/26/13 12:49 PM, "Chiradeep Vittal" <chiradeep.vit...@citrix.com> wrote: >+1. >Of course we must ensure proper treatment of this data (anonymization, >retention, removal, copyrights) > >On 11/23/13 11:01 AM, "Wido den Hollander" <w...@widodh.nl> wrote: > >>Hi, >> >>I discussed this during CCCEU13 with David, Chip and Hugo and I promised >>I put it on the ml. >> >>My idea is to come up with a reporting tool which users can run daily >>which feeds us back information about how they are using CloudStack: >> >>* Hypervisors >>* Zone sizes >>* Cluster sizes >>* Primary Storage sizes and types >>* Same for Secondary Storage >>* Number of management servers >>* Version >> >>This would ofcourse be anonimized where we would send one file with JSON >>data back to our servers where we can proccess it to do statistics. >> >>The tool will obviously be open source and participating in this will be >>opt-in only. >> >>We currently don't know what's running out there, so that would be great >>to know. >> >>Some questions remain: >>* Who is going to maintain the data? >>* Who has access to the data? >>* How long do we keep it? >>* Do we do logging of IPs sending the data to us? >> >>I certainly do not want to spy on our users, so that's why it's opt-in >>and the tool should be part of the main repo, but I think that for us as >>a project it's very useful to know what our users are doing with >>CloudStack. >> >>Comments? >> >>Wido >
