Telemetry

OpenShell collects anonymous telemetry to help improve the project. The data shows aggregate usage of sandbox, provider, and policy workflows. It is not used to track individual users. Aggregate usage trends are published every two weeks in the community telemetry reports.

What Is Collected

Telemetry events are limited to anonymous operational categories and counts, such as sandbox lifecycle outcomes, provider profile buckets, policy decision counts, and aggregate network activity denial categories.

OpenShell telemetry does not collect sandbox names or IDs, hostnames, file paths, binary paths, prompts, credentials, provider names, model names, or user content.

Opting out applies only to telemetry emitted by OpenShell. Third-party services, model providers, inference endpoints, agents, or tools that you configure and use with OpenShell may have their own terms and privacy practices.

Disable Telemetry at Runtime

Set OPENSHELL_TELEMETRY_ENABLED=false on the gateway deployment. For Helm installs, set server.telemetryEnabled=false. OpenShell propagates this setting into sandbox supervisor environments, so sandbox-side telemetry collection is disabled as well.

Compile Telemetry Out

Telemetry support is a default-on telemetry Cargo feature. Each crate that carries it also defines a defaults-without-telemetry alias covering every other default feature. Build telemetry-free artifacts with --no-default-features --features defaults-without-telemetry:

cargo build --release -p openshell-gateway --no-default-features --features defaults-without-telemetry
cargo build --release -p openshell-sandbox --no-default-features --features defaults-without-telemetry
cargo build --release -p openshell-driver-vm --no-default-features --features defaults-without-telemetry

The resulting binaries contain no telemetry endpoint, no telemetry HTTP client, and no emission code. With telemetry compiled out, the gateway emits nothing and reports telemetry disabled to the sandboxes it launches.

Cargo cannot subtract a single default feature, so defaults-without-telemetry must be paired with --no-default-features. Passing it on its own leaves the defaults in place and fails the build rather than producing a binary that still emits.

Select Compute Drivers

The gateway exposes separate Cargo features for its built-in compute drivers: compute-driver-kubernetes, compute-driver-docker, compute-driver-podman, compute-driver-vm, and compute-driver-mxc. Disable the default feature set, then enable only the drivers and telemetry mode the target binary needs:

# Docker only, with telemetry support.
cargo build --release -p openshell-gateway --no-default-features --features telemetry,compute-driver-docker
# Docker and VM only, with telemetry compiled out.
cargo build --release -p openshell-gateway --no-default-features --features compute-driver-docker,compute-driver-vm
# Windows MXC only, with telemetry support and bundled Z3.
cargo build --release -p openshell-gateway --no-default-features --features telemetry,compute-driver-mxc,bundled-z3

Regular builds keep their platform driver set through the default in-tree-compute-drivers compatibility feature. On Windows, compute-driver-mxc selects MXC and the other four features install unsupported-driver stubs. On other platforms, MXC is excluded.