Telemetry and data collection

Doc Detective collects basic anonymous telemetry to help the team understand product issues and usage. Telemetry is on by default, never sends personal or documentation content, and you can turn it off with a single config setting.

The notice you see

Each time you run Doc Detective, it prints a telemetry notice at the info log level.

When telemetry is on (the default):

Doc Detective collects basic anonymous telemetry to understand product issues and usage. To disable telemetry, set 'telemetry.send' to 'false' in your .doc-detective.json config file.

When you turn telemetry off:

Telemetry is disabled. Basic anonymous telemetry helps Doc Detective understand product issues and usage. To enable telemetry, set 'telemetry.send' to 'true' in your .doc-detective.json config file.

What Doc Detective collects

Each telemetry event records the command you ran (for example, runTests) and a set of anonymous environment properties:

For runTests commands, Doc Detective also sends a flattened summary of the run: pass and fail counts for specs, tests, and contexts. It sends result counts only, never the contents of your documentation, tests, URLs, or screenshots.

Doc Detective attributes each event to the identifier anonymous unless you set a userId (see Identify your runs), and sends telemetry to PostHog.

Turn telemetry off

To disable telemetry, set telemetry.send to false in your .doc-detective.json config file:

{
  "telemetry": {
    "send": false
  }
}

When telemetry.send is false, Doc Detective returns before it assembles or sends any telemetry data. For the full field reference, see Telemetry options.

Identify your runs

By default, telemetry events are anonymous. To attribute your runs to an organization, group, or individual, set telemetry.userId:

{
  "telemetry": {
    "send": true,
    "userId": "your-team-name"
  }
}

Override metadata with DOC_DETECTIVE_META

Distributions that wrap Doc Detective can identify themselves through the DOC_DETECTIVE_META environment variable. Set it to a JSON object whose fields seed the telemetry metadata, for example to record a custom deployment:

export DOC_DETECTIVE_META='{"dist_deployment":"docker","dist_interface":"cli"}'

Doc Detective merges these values into the properties it collects. Any field you don’t set falls back to the value Doc Detective detects automatically. Setting DOC_DETECTIVE_META doesn’t enable telemetry on its own: if telemetry.send is false, Doc Detective sends nothing.