RFD 0106 - Machine ID Anonymous Agent Telemetry

Required Approvers

• Engineering: @zmb3
• Product: @klizhentas && @xinding33

What

Collect anonymous usage information about invocations of the Machine ID agent.

Out of scope is the collection of usage information from the Auth server.

Why

It is currently difficult to determine the adoption of Machine ID, and for what use-cases they use Machine ID for. This makes product decisions about determining areas of focus more difficult.

Basic anonymous telemetry from the tbot agent will provide helpful information on adoption without compromising privacy.

Details

Event collection

For now, a single event on startup will be submitted by tbot.

This will be implemented as part of tool/tbot rather than lib/tbot, meaning that events will be submitted when using the tbot binary but not when embedding the tbot library within another binary. This means data will not be polluted by internal uses of the tbot library (e.g the operator).

Event collection and submission will be started concurrently to the tbot functionality, and should not impede the primary function of tbot. In the case of failure, a warning message should be omitted. The routine will read in the configuration of tbot, extract the relevant values and encode these within an event protobuf.

Event submission

Events will be submitted directly to an unauthenticated tbot specific endpoint of the prehog service:

syntax = "proto3";

package prehog.v1alpha;

import "google/protobuf/timestamp.proto";

message SubmitTbotEventRequest {
  // UUID identifying that tbot session. This is future-proofing for if we
  // decide to add multiple events in future, and need to tie them together.
  string distinct_id = 1;
  // optional, will default to the ingest time if unset
  google.protobuf.Timestamp timestamp = 2;

  oneof event {
    // See the events section for the fields included within startup.
    TbotStartEvent start = 3;
  }
}

message SubmitTbotEventResponse {}

service TbotReportingService {
  rpc SubmitTbotEvent(SubmitTbotEventRequest) returns (SubmitTbotEventResponse) {}
}

As only a single event will be submitted, batching is not of concern.

Event storage

Events received by prehog will be encoded in a PostHog compatible format and then submitted to PostHog.

Tbot events will be share the same project as clusters and website events.

Consent

Users will explicitly opt-in to anonymous usage telemetry with an environment variable, e.g:

# Send anonymous telemetry on startup about the usage of tbot in order
# to help us understand what parts of Machine ID to improve.
# Find out more at goteleport.com/awesome-docs-page
export TELEPORT_ANONYMOUS_TELEMETRY=1
tbot start --snip--

For helpers like GitHub actions, this will be another option the user can provide, e.g:

steps:
  - name: Install Teleport
    uses: teleport-actions/setup@v1
    with:
      version: 11.0.3
  - name: Authorize against Teleport
    id: auth
    uses: teleport-actions/auth@v1
    with:
      # Send anonymous telemetry on startup about the usage of tbot in order
      # to help us understand what parts of Machine ID to improve.
      # Find out more at goteleport.com/awesome-docs-page
      anonymous-telemetry: true

Examples provided in the documentation will be updated to include this value to encourage opt-in, but will make clear that this parameter can be removed.

A documentation page will be created that will explain what telemetry is collected and where this telemetry is stored.

When telemetry is enabled, a log message will be output on startup stating that telemetry is being collected and linking to the relevant documentation.

When telemetry is not enabled, a log message will be output on startup informing the user that Telemetry is not enabled and linking to the relevant documentation.

Anonymization

The events will contain no properties that identify a user, tbot or Teleport cluster. Therefore, no additional anonymization is required at this time.

Events

tbot.start

Event properties:

• tbot.run_mode: one of [one-shot, daemon]
• tbot.version: string indicating the version of tbot
• tbot.join_type: string indicating the join type configured
• tbot.helper: optional string indicating if a helper is invoking tbot. For example: gha:teleport-actions/auth
• tbot.helper_version: optional string indicating the version of the helper that invoking tbot
• tbot.destinations_other: a count of destinations configured that are not associated with Database Access, Kubernetes Access or Application Access
• tbot.destinations_database: a count of Database Access destinations configured
• tbot.destinations_kubernetes: a count of Kubernetes Access destinations configured
• tbot.destinations_application: a count of Application Access destinations configured.