Telemetry in Zed

Zed collects anonymous telemetry data to help the team understand how people are using the application and to see what sort of issues they are experiencing.

Configuring Telemetry Settings

You have full control over what data is sent out by Zed. To enable or disable some or all telemetry types, open your settings.json file via zed: open settings(cmd-,|ctrl-,) from the command palette.

Insert and tweak the following:

"telemetry": {
    "diagnostics": false,
    "metrics": false
},

The telemetry settings can also be configured via the welcome screen, which can be invoked via the workspace: welcome action in the command palette.

Dataflow

Telemetry is sent from the application to our servers. Data is proxied through our servers to enable us to easily switch analytics services. We currently use:

  • Axiom: Cloud-monitoring service - stores diagnostic events
  • Snowflake: Business Intelligence platform - stores both diagnostic and metric events
  • Metabase: Dashboards - dashboards built around data pulled from Snowflake

Types of Telemetry

Diagnostics

Diagnostic events include debug information (stack traces) from crash reports. Reports are sent on the first application launch after the crash occurred. We've built dashboards that allow us to visualize the frequency and severity of issues experienced by users. Having these reports sent automatically allows us to begin implementing fixes without the user needing to file a report in our issue tracker. The plots in the dashboards also give us an informal measurement of the stability of Zed.

You can see what data is sent when a panic occurs by inspecting the Panic struct in crates/telemetry_events/src/telemetry_events.rs in the Zed repo. You can find additional information in the Debugging Crashes documentation.

Usage Data (Metrics)

To improve Zed and understand how it is being used in the wild, Zed optionally collects usage data like the following:

  • (a) file extensions of opened files;
  • (b) features and tools You use within the Editor;
  • (c) project statistics (e.g., number of files); and
  • (d) frameworks detected in Your projects

Usage Data does not include any of Your software code or sensitive project details. Metric events are reported over HTTPS, and requests are rate-limited to avoid using significant network bandwidth.

Usage Data is associated with a secure random telemetry ID which may be linked to Your email address. This linkage currently serves two purposes: (1) it allows Zed to analyze usage patterns over time while maintaining Your privacy; and (2) it enables Zed to reach out to specific user groups for feedback and improvement suggestions.

You can audit the metrics data that Zed has reported by running the command zed: open telemetry log from the command palette, or clicking Help > View Telemetry Log in the application menu.

You can see the full list of the event types and exactly the data sent for each by inspecting the Event enum and the associated structs in crates/telemetry_events/src/telemetry_events.rs in the Zed repository.

Concerns and Questions

If you have concerns about telemetry, please feel free to open an issue.