Using Active Install data for XWiki SAS support clients

Development
1

Hi devs,

I’m starting this thread today not with a committer hat, but with my hat of client services lead within XWiki SAS. As you probably know, XWiki SAS provide professional support on top of XWiki instances through support contracts. XWiki SAS is also the top sponsoring company of the XWiki project. As part of this, the company also hosts the Active Installs server / infrastructure for the XWiki project.

Today, XWiki instances will report multiple information to XWiki’s Active Installs server, as described here. Each report is identified by the instance ID of the XWiki instance, which is a random UUID. The IP addresses of these reports are not kept, in order to anonymize the statistics. We currently mostly publish aggregates of Active Installs data on xwiki.org, and the raw data is accessible on ELK.

Since 2017, XWiki SAS publishes “Pro Applications”, which are basically Open Source applications that come with a license check and professional support. The licenses issued for Pro Apps are issued for a given instance ID. XWiki SAS will also keep track of the licenses it issues : each customer of an XWiki Pro Application is linked to one or multiple instance IDs.

As part of the support operations @ XWiki SAS, we observe that we frequently need many information about the environment under which an XWiki instance we support runs, such as the Java version, the number of documents, the extensions installed, the servlet container used, …

So my question is the following :

Would it be OK to allow the top sponsoring company to query the Active Installs database for records about one instance ID, as part of the support operations for this very instance ID ?

Note that this motion does not require any technical work on the side of the XWiki project.

If this option is acceptable, we (at XWiki SAS) plan to update our general support conditions to add a mention about the fact that :

  • As part of support operations, XWiki SAS may use publicly available data from the XWiki Active Installs system to help diagnosing support tickets.
  • If a client wants to opt-out of this process, we will provide them with instructions on how to disable Active Installs telemetry on its instance.

Here’s my +1

Thanks,
Clément

2

IMO this is not really a question for xwiki.org since the data published by xwiki.org is already public.

What’s important for XWiki users is to know that the anonymity of the active installs is ensured by the anonymity of their instance id (which is a generated unique id). If they share this instance id with someone, then it’s possible to link that instance id with the active installs data issued by their XWiki server. If they don’t share it, then it’s impossible to link the active installs to them.

Thus, I think this is an issue for XWiki SAS customers only, i.e. that in their contracts they agree to provide active installs data to XWiki SAS when using paying apps.

Thanks for being transparent about this Clément.

1 Like
3

Hi,

Thanks @vmassol for the feedback !

Clément