Privacy and Telemetry

In order to continually improve Chef Workstation, we collect information to help us identify bugs and understand how people interact with Chef Workstation.

What We Collect

We capture:

• A unique installation-id that isn’t connected to user data. This helps us track the number of active Chef Workstation installations without needing to perform IP-based tracking.
• The Chef-specific commands you execute, but none of the arguments you pass.
• Your host operating system and version.
• A SHA256 sum of any hostname that you’re connecting to via chef-run.
• How you connect to a remote host via chef-run, either WinRM or SSH.
• Target operating system of any hosts connected to via chef-run.

How We Use Your Data

We use this data to track Chef Workstation usage patterns, identify bugs, and iterate development based real aggregated feedback.

Only Chef Software, Inc employees have access to your data. We will never sell, re-sell, or use your data in a malicious manner.

Opting out

• To stop the capture of telemetry data from a single session, set the environment variable CHEF_TELEMETRY_OPT_OUT to any value before running chef-run, for example:

  CHEF_TELEMETRY_OPT_OUT=1 chef-run -h
  

• Disable telemetry entirely by adding the following to $HOME/.chef-workstation/config.toml:

  [telemetry]
  enabled=false
  

See Your Data

You can view the analytics we collect before it is sent. Find—and remove—your data in the HOME/.chef-workstation/telemetry/ folder. We save the data from a current chef-run in the telemetry folder and collect it at the start of the next chef-run.

When telemetry is disabled, we won’t collect your previously stored analytics.