Metrics collection information

We decided it would be useful for us and the community to understand and know three key pieces of information about PatchMon instances out in the field.

1. Qty of installations / live setups
2. Qty of hosts being monitored
3. Version number of your instance

This is so we can produce a metric on the website to show this live statistic.

I consulted with the community on Discord explaining how it's done (the chat can be seen in the Security channel)

Essentially this is the flow:

The main reason is, as a founder it would be amazing to track progression of the app globally to understand how many instances are out there. However something to also note, if there is a security concern with a previous version then we need to know how many instances of that version is out in the field.

Questions: 

Do you collect IPs?

Nope - IP addresses are not outputted into any file or seen in a console log when your instance reaches out to us. 

How do I opt-in or out ? 

Go into settings, metrics and press the toggle button to stop the schedule

How do I delete the information about my qty of hosts and version number you have ?

Please send us an email to support@patchmon.net with your uuid and we will remove it from the database. Note that if you do this then this will be the only time we will be able to associate you with your instance id

What happens if I regenerate my instance id?

In our reports we get a new instance ID and it's duplicated, we have no way of knowing which instance it has replaced however our metrics will look at last 7 days active instances and we will use this metric on the website, so after 7 days the number will drop again

Can I see the code for this?

Absolutely, this project and its code for the app is viewable on github, you'll be able to see how the metrics collector works.