Azure / Azure/Azure-Verified-Modules

[Question/Feedback]: Less noisy telemetry option for Terraform?

Open
#2,665 2 comments 0 reactions 1 assignee Claimed by @jaredfholgate View on GitHub
Type: Question/Feedback :raising_hand:
Dominant language
PowerShell
Stars
580
Forks
161
Avg merge
11h 3m
Merged PRs (30d)
15

Description

### Check for previous/existing GitHub issues

- [x] I have checked for previous/existing GitHub issues

### Description

With Terraform modules, currently every time a module version or source is updated (we pin to specific Git commits) the telemetry values are updated. In deployments with lots of resources, such as landing zones this creates a lot of noise when running the plan during a module update, which makes it difficult to identify what is just a telemetry ping vs an actual resource change.

You can learn to ignore changes to modtm resources, although it increases the risk of missing something, but some modules are setting telemetry headers on the resources themselves which becomes far too noisy for effective review, e.g. https://github.com/Azure/terraform-azurerm-avm-res-network-virtualnetwork/blob/a0bbf6176498c3ad6e0ba207df524caac280f97c/main.tf#L47-L49

The simple workaround is just to disable telemetry, but we're not against telemetry in principal, we want you to know we're using the modules so you keep working on them, we just can't risk missing a breaking change because it was lost in a sea of telemetry updates.

Does it make sense to have a reduced telemetry option that excludes the source and version? That way the telemetry values remain consistent once created so there's no noise during updates, and you still get most of the telemetry data rather than nothing.

This concept could be extended to give different privacy levels, e.g. there may be people that are ok with telemetry as long as the tenant ID and subscription ID aren't sent. e.g. in https://github.com/Azure/terraform-azurerm-avm-res-network-virtualnetwork/blob/a0bbf6176498c3ad6e0ba207df524caac280f97c/main.telemetry.tf#L16-L17

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.