This document provides details about OPA’s anonymous information reporting feature.

Overview

OPA periodically reports its version and specific anonymous runtime statistics to a publicly hosted, external service. The reports contain the OPA version number (e.g., v0.12.3), a randomly generated UUID and the following runtime statistics:

• heap usage in bytes

This feature is only applicable to the opa run and opa version commands.

In case of the opa run command, this feature is ON by-default and can be easily disabled by specifying the --disable-telemetry flag. When OPA is started in either the server or repl mode, OPA calls the external service on a best-effort basis and shares the version it’s running and other statistics such as current memory usage. The time taken to execute the remote call and process the subsequent response from the external service does not delay OPA’s start-up.

In case of the opa version command, this feature can be enabled by specifying the --check or -c flag.

External Service

OPA uploads its information by default at telemetry.openpolicyagent.org. The environment variable OPA_TELEMETRY_SERVICE_URL can be used to configure the external service OPA reports to.

Sample HTTP request from OPA to the external service looks like this:

POST /v1/version HTTP/1.1
Host: telemetry.openpolicyagent.org
Content-Type: application/json
User-Agent: "Open Policy Agent/v0.12.3 (darwin, amd64)"

{
  "id": "08c1d850-6065-478a-b9b5-a8f9f464ad33",
  "version": "v0.12.3",
  "heap_usage_bytes": "596000"
}

The id field in the request body above is a version 4 random UUID generated when OPA starts.

The external service checks the OPA version reported by a remote OPA client and responds with information about the latest OPA release. This information includes a link to download the latest OPA version, release notes etc.

Sample response from the external service looks like this:

{
  "latest": {
    "download": "https://openpolicyagent.org/downloads/v0.19.2/opa_darwin_amd64",
    "release_notes": "https://github.com/open-policy-agent/opa/releases/tag/v0.19.2",
    "latest_release": "v0.19.2"
  }
}

The external service response contains a link to download the latest released OPA binary for client’s platform, and a link to the OPA release notes.

Benefits

• OPA’s anonymous version reporting feature provides users with up-to-date information about new OPA versions while still executing the familiar OPA run and version commands. It helps users stay abreast of OPA’s latest capabilities and hence empowers them to make informed decisions while upgrading their OPA deployments.

• OPA maintainers and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) executive staff can use the version reports for obtaining more information about OPA usage and engagement. For example, the information can be used in making better decisions about OPA’s deprecation cycle.

• Reporting a running OPA’s memory usage can help to better understand how much memory an OPA instance is consuming and thereby drive optimization efforts around better resource utilization. Some users have concerns around OPA’s memory usage and hence this information can help OPA maintainers quantify the number of impacted OPA deployments and also guide future features and priorities for the project.