Telemetry, and the channel to the project

covey talks to the project it comes from in two places, and both are the same channel with the same switch in front of them.

1. Telemetry: a handful of counts, once a day

On by default, and that is a decision rather than an oversight: without it the project knows nothing about how covey is actually run — which version installations are on, whether a release is being adopted, how many agents a typical instance holds — and every answer to that becomes a guess.

What goes out, in full:

What never goes out: a task title, an agent slug, a prompt, a result, a mail address, a repository, a URL, an organisation name, a customer name. Nothing an agent produced and nothing anybody typed. The assembly is one short function — internal/telemetry, Zahlen — and the test beside it (TestTelemetrieSchicktNurZahlen) takes a real task title and a real agent slug out of a running instance and fails if either appears in what is sent.

The identity is a UUID the installation generates for itself on first use (telemetry.id). It exists so that yesterday's counts and today's are the same installation. It carries no name and no address.

Switching it off

Three ways, and each of them means nothing leaves the machine:

# 1. The setting, under Platform → Settings
telemetry.mode = off

# 2. No destination
telemetry.url = (empty)

# 3. The environment — this one works before the first start
COVEY_TELEMETRY=off

2. The channel for a platform fault

covey Doctor's job includes the finding that no configuration fixes: three agents died at the turn limit this week and none of them was misconfigured. That is a bug report, and it belongs in the tracker of the repository covey is maintained in.

Two ways lead there, and the platform picks whichever is available:

• Your own account. Store the target system's token as an organisation secret (github_token, gitlab_token, …) and set Organisation → This platform's source. The control plane files under that account. Nothing leaves the installation except the report the agent wrote.
• The project's channel, when the destination is the project's own repository and no account of your own is stored. The report goes to covey.work, where a person reads it before it becomes an issue — installations the project knows are released automatically, everything else waits. Nothing reaches a public tracker unread.

Either way the agent never sees a credential, the destination is master data rather than a parameter, and the same report is recorded in your own inbox so that you see what went out.

An organisation that files into its own GitLab (its own target system, its own project) never uses the project's channel: its findings stay in the house, which is what that setting is for.

What is in such a report

What covey Doctor wrote: a title, and a body with its evidence — which agents, which runs, what it cost, and what it found in the source where it may read it. It is a text an agent composed about the platform. If your instance handles material that must not leave it, store an account of your own for your own tracker, or switch the layer off entirely with - under Organisation → This platform's source.