Kibana Telemetry Service

Telemetry allows Kibana features to have usage tracked in the wild. The general term "telemetry" refers to multiple things:

1. Integrating with the telemetry service to express how to collect usage data (Collecting).
2. Sending a payload of usage data up to Elastic's telemetry cluster.
3. Viewing usage data in the Kibana instance of the telemetry cluster (Viewing).

This plugin is responsible for sending usage data to the telemetry cluster. For collecting usage data, use the usageCollection plugin

Telemetry Plugin public API

Setup

The setup function exposes the following interface:

• getTelemetryUrl: () => Promise<URL>: An async function that resolves into the telemetry Url used to send telemetry. The url is wrapped with node's URL constructor. Here is an example on how to grab the url origin:
  Copy

  const telemetryUrl = await getTelemetryUrl();
    > telemetryUrl.origin; // 'https://telemetry.elastic.co'
  

  Note that the telemetry URL is a kibana.yml configuration hence it is recommended to call the getTelemetryUrl everytime before using the actual url.

Start

The start function exposes the following interface:

• async getIsOptedIn(): Promise<boolean>: An async function that resolves into true if the user has opted into send Elastic usage data. Resolves to false if the user explicitly opted out of sending usage data to Elastic or did not choose to opt-in or out yet after a minor or major upgrade (only when previously opted out).

Usage

To use the exposed plugin start and setup contracts:

1. Make sure telemetry is in your optionalPlugins in the kibana.json file:

// <plugin>/kibana.json
{
"id": "...",
"optionalPlugins": ["telemetry"]
}

2. Use the exposed contracts:

// <plugin>/server/plugin.ts

import { TelemetryPluginsStart } from '../telemetry/server`;

interface MyPluginStartDeps {
  telemetry?: TelemetryPluginsStart;
}

class MyPlugin {
  public async start(
    core: CoreStart,
    { telemetry }: MyPluginStartDeps
  ) {
    const isOptedIn = await telemetry?.getIsOptedIn();
    ...
  }
}

Local EBT shipper

When developing any EBT events, sometimes, developers are not sure if their event will be as useful as they think. Setting the dev-only configuration telemetry.localShipper: true, all the EBT events will be indexed in the local ES under the indices ebt-kibana-browser and ebt-kibana-server.