What data we collect

Syside collects no usage data whatsoever. Nothing about which features you use, what you model, or how you work leaves your machine. The only data Syside sends is what your license agreement has to enforce, plus crash reports that are off by default. See What governs your use of Syside for which agreement applies to your license.

License management data

License management data is only used to enforce that Syside tools are licensed and used fairly. It comes from our licensing implementation, which checks the license validity and sends heartbeats.

Syside sends the following:

  • License key, and which Syside product it is being checked against.

  • IP address of the machine.

  • Time of the license check or a heartbeat. Syside sends out a heartbeat every 30 minutes.

  • Hashed machine ID.

  • Hostname of the machine.

  • Operating system, CPU architecture, and number of CPU cores.

None of it describes what you do with the tools; it establishes only that a licensed user is running them. We do not feed it into product analytics, feature usage reports, or user profiling.

Offline Installation

No license management data is collected for Syside offline installations as described in Offline license. For further information about different license types, refer to Licensing.

Crash reports

Syside has the ability to automatically collect and send crash report logs back to Sensmetry. This automatic crash log reporting allows us to discover and fix critical bugs faster. The automatic crash log reporting is off by default, and you need to enable it explicitly.

We do not get any of your models or your Python scripts. We also trim any Language Server Protocol payloads to avoid leaking secrets, which enables you to use the trace level logging without worry.

Crash reports may, however, contain file paths, because a crash is often only explicable from the file being processed when it happened. Paths are absolute, so one carries a filename, the directory structure above it, and your user name. If your project names are themselves sensitive, treat the reports as identifying and turn automatic crash reporting off. The logs saved locally are the same ones we receive, so you can read exactly which paths a report would carry.

The logs that would be sent to Sensmetry are locally saved to %LOCALAPPDATA%\syside (on Windows) or ~/.local/state/syside (on macOS and Linux) for you to have a way to inspect what data would be sent. The logs are compressed using ZStandard compression, which should be supported by most modern decompressors, or you can also download the zstd tool.

Automatic crash reporting is disabled by default. If you wish, you can enable automatic crash reporting by:

  • Editor / Modeler: Either setting the syside.telemetry.crashReports setting to True, while having telemetry.telemetryLevel setting set to crash or higher, and restarting Syside. If telemetry.telemetryLevel is set to off, then the Syside setting has no effect and does not send any crash reports.

  • Automator: Executing syside.debug.set_crash_report_upload(True) function.

  • Modeler CLI: Passing in --crash-reports upload command line argument.