Telemetry

The CDK for Terraform CLI interacts with a HashiCorp service called Checkpoint to report project metrics such as cdktf version, project language, provider name, platform name, and other details that help guide the project maintainers with feature and roadmap decisions. All HashiCorp projects, including Terraform Core, use Checkpoint. Read more about project metrics in this issue.

Starting with CDK for Terraform 0.6, this information includes a random UUID that uniquely identifies the machine, and new projects will have a project-specific UUID added to the cdktf.json file. The purpose of these UUIDs is to help team understand how the tool is used in order to help us prioritize features. The code that interacts with Checkpoint is part of CDK for Terraform CLI.

CDK for Terraform fingerprints the type of CI used and includes that in telemetry instead of the UUID when CDK for Terraform runs in a Continuous Integration tool, such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or GitLab. The only information submitted is the type of CI system, and no unique information about accounts, paths, workspaces, environment variables, or other potentially private information is shared. This data helps the team plan where to focus future efforts, because running infrastructure as code tools in CI is a key workflow we seek to improve.

The information that is sent to Checkpoint is anonymous and cannot be used to identify the user or host. The use of Checkpoint is completely optional and it can be disabled at any time by setting the CHECKPOINT_DISABLE environment variable to a non-empty value.

Crash Reporting

To improve the stability of the CDK for Terraform CLI we also use Sentry for error reporting.

The error reports sent include a stack trace and log events that happened before the error. This information only gets sent if there is an error. If no error happens a session is tracked, so that we can calculate the percentage of crash free sessions as a metric.

The error reporting is scoped to the CLI and no environment variables are tracked, limiting the risk of sending secret information by accident.

We won't track any errors as long as the sendCrashReports property in the cdktf.json file is not set or is set to false. If it is not set we will ask you if you want to enable crash reporting and persist the answer in your cdktf.json file. If you change your mind, change the sendCrashReports property in your cdktf.json file to false to disable error reporting.