Our Eclipse plugins are constantly evolving and in that we are using usage data and error reports to know how the plugins are used and what areas that could use improvements.
To do that there are two separate functionalities:
- Usage
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Since August 2010 JBoss Tools 3.2 provides a Usage plugin which when installed and enabled helps us gather anonymous statistics about how the JBoss Tools plugins are being used. All the data is gathered anonymously and can at any time be disabled if you wish.
- Error reporting
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Notice - As of April 28, 2020, JBoss Tools 4.15 will suspend AERI feature operations. Many thanks to everyone who participated!
Since March 2016 JBoss Tools 4.3 enables use of Eclipse AERI to detect errors and offer the user to submit data to us for helping in categorising, reporting and resolving issues. Users can submit these anonymously or provide an e-mail to receive further updates.
Details below.
Usage
How will the data be used
With this enabled we can start seeing better how and where JBoss Tools is being used; we are especially currently interested in seeing what OS’s are being used, what screen resolution and how often users starts their workspace.
Over time we hope to learn more to help continuously improve JBoss Tools.
How to enable/disable usage tracking
If you have the plugin installed, then on the first start of this Eclipse a dialog will pop up asking you to send anonymous usage statistics.
If you do not want to send anonymous usage statistics, uncheck the checkbox and press Ok.
If you press No, no usage statistics will be collected but the dialog will ask again on next startup.
If you just press Yes then usage statistics for JBoss Tools is enabled.
If you later on decide to not send statistics anymore or want to enable it, simply goto the Preferences JBoss Tools > JBoss Usage Reporting Preferences.
How it works
When the user has enabled reporting anonymous statistics the plugin uses Google Analytics to track data as though you visited a page under http://jboss.org/tools/usage/.
The information collected is similar/equal to what is possible to collect when you visit a website, including your IP address, and may be transferred to the United States and other countries.
We do tweak a few things to track more Eclipse oriented things; i.e. instead of Browser name we use the Eclipse product ID and instead of Browser version we use the version of the product or if not present the version of Eclipse core runtime plugin.
We also generate a random id for the installation so multiple startups from the same eclipse only count as one usage.
Before March 2014 the main tracking was when a workspace starts up with the plugin installed. Basically a ping back indicating someone started up Eclipse with JBoss Tools installed.
Since 20th March 2014 we also started sending events when certain features are used. Initially for things like which server type are used, what connectors are being installed etc. To give a picture of what features and tooling are actually being used. No personal details are sent in these events - just ids for features used for generating usage statistics.
If you want to inspect the source code for all of the above it can be foun here
Error Reporting
Notice - As of April 28, 2020, JBoss Tools 4.15 will suspend AERI feature operations. Many thanks to everyone who participated!
The error reporting uses Eclipse AERI which been successfully used by Eclipse Foundation to gather error reports from core Eclipse plugins.
The error reporting is available when installing most JBoss Tools plugins after JBoss Tools 4.3.1.
When error occurs that looks like it is related to JBoss Tools plugin a notification will pop-up in the lower right outlining the error the user can dismiss, send directly or provide more details.
In the submission you can optionally provide an email address. This address will be used to contact you should more information be required. Without it, all reports are entirely anonymous.
Should you want to adjust, enable, or disable error reporting you can do that in via that should look similar to this:
How it works
On startup https://tools.jboss.org/usage/errors/rest/2.0/community/discovery is loaded that configures JBoss Tools as an additional receiver of error reports from Eclipse AERI.
This configuration file lists the packages and bundles to which AERI will listen for errors most likely related to JBoss Tools.
