Enhancing Progress Chef Infra Server with Data-Driven Insights via Usage Data Collection

The Progress Chef team takes a lot of input from surveys, users, contributors and internal teams. However, in recent years we have determined we need more data to make informed choices about the product's direction. We need to understand the adoption curve, supported operating systems and versions. Additionally, from a user side of things, we need to understand their deployment patterns and how often they change. Hence, surveys, feedback forms or a one-time extraction will not be enough as we need quantifiable time series data to derive meaningful results. With the release of Chef Infra Server 15.10, anonymous information on product usage will be collected.

We’ve taken a very cautionary approach to the data collection hoping that it will be enough to gather the insights required. In addition, we’ve put in a lot of effort to maintain the protection of the end user via the data we collect. As a result, we can draw meaningful conclusions from the information provided.

Infra Server 15.10 will be transmitting, and Progress Chef will be aggregating, the following anonymized information:

• The Chef Infra Server version
• Hashed variant of FQDN of the load balancer that Chef Infra Server is installed on, which determines if multiple instances of the Chef Infra Server are in use
• Reports the domain name associated with the most common number of logins registered with Infra Server. Examples: progress.com, my-charity.org, a-service-provider.net
• The number of nodes checked into the server in the last 30 days
• The chef-server-ctl binary filename and location
• The Chef Infra Server's configuration file location

This information will help us to continue to service all our users, be friendly to downstreams, forked distributions and partners. The data will allow us to focus our time on the most impactful features.

If we cannot draw meaningful conclusions from this data, we will consider extending the data collection to include a count of versions and/or the operating system family of Chef Infra Clients reporting into Chef Server.

The data we’re collecting will be mentioned in the ReadMe.txt file of public repository of Chef Server. Data collection is a background process that will not impact Chef Infra Server in any of the supported deployment patterns.

The effort of usage data collection in Chef Infra should foster better investment from the business to meet the growing need of our users and existing customers. For any clarification, please reach out to george.westwater@progress.com or ankur.mundhra@progress.com.