Dashdown Docs

Telemetry & privacy

Dashdown is pip-installed and self-hosted, with no accounts and no server in the loop. To understand how many people actually use it — which versions, on which platforms — the CLI sends a small, anonymous usage event when you run dashdown serve or dashdown build. It's on by default and takes one command to turn off.

Note

We collect this to answer a single question: is anyone using Dashdown, and on what? It is never used to identify you, and it never touches your data, queries, or dashboards.

What is sent #

Two events, cli_serve and cli_build, each carrying only:

  • the Dashdown version,
  • the Python version,
  • the operating system and CPU architecture (e.g. Darwin / arm64),
  • a random install_id (a UUID generated once and stored locally) so unique installs can be counted.

Events are sent with PostHog's $process_person_profile: false, so no person profile is created — they are anonymous. The destination is PostHog's EU cloud.

You can see the exact payload that would be sent at any time:

dashdown telemetry status

What is never sent #

  • Your project's contents, page text, or Markdown.
  • Any SQL, DAX, or query results — no data of any kind.
  • File paths, project names, hostnames, or directory layout.
  • Connector names or credentials (not even connector types).
  • IP-derived identity, cookies, or any personal data.

Turning it off #

Any one of these disables telemetry — pick whichever fits:

# This machine, persistently:
dashdown telemetry off          # re-enable with: dashdown telemetry on

# Per command / environment:
DASHDOWN_TELEMETRY=0 dashdown serve .
DO_NOT_TRACK=1 dashdown serve .     # the cross-tool standard, also honored

Or per project, in dashdown.yaml:

telemetry:
  enabled: false

dashdown telemetry status always shows whether telemetry is on and, if off, which of these switched it off.

Tip

DO_NOT_TRACK=1 is honored automatically — if you already set it for other tools, Dashdown is opted out with no extra step.

How it works #

The sender lives in dashdown/telemetry.py and is deliberately decoupled from the render path: it never runs during a page request, the network call is fire-and-forget on a background thread with a short timeout, and every error is swallowed — telemetry can never slow down or break a dashdown command. If the project key isn't configured in a given build, nothing is sent at all.

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