Visual Studio Code collects usage data and sends it to Microsoft to help improve our products and services. Read our privacy statement and telemetry documentation to learn more.
This topic has guidelines for extension authors so that their extensions can conform to VS Code telemetry requirements and best practices.
Telemetry moduleNote: If you don't want to send usage data to Microsoft, you can set the
telemetry.telemetryLevel
user setting tooff
.
The VS Code team maintains the @vscode/extension-telemetry npm module that provides a consistent and safe way to collect telemetry within VS Code. The module reports telemetry to Azure Monitor and Application Insights and guarantees backwards compatibility against previous versions of VS Code.
Follow this guide to set up Azure Monitor and get your Application Insights instrumentation key.
Without the telemetry moduleExtension authors who wish not to use Application Insights can utilize their own custom solution to send telemetry. In this case, it is still required that extension authors respect the user's choice by utilizing the isTelemetryEnabled
and onDidChangeTelemetryEnabled
API. By doing this, users will have one centralized place to control their telemetry settings.
Extension may wish to give user control for extension specific telemetry independent of VS Code telemetry. In this case, we suggest that you introduce a specific extension setting. It is recommended that custom telemetry settings be tagged with telemetry
and usesOnlineServices
so that users can more easily query them in the Settings UI. Adding a custom telemetry setting is not an exemption from respecting a user's decision and the isTelemetryEnabled
and onDidChangeTelemetryEnabled
flag must always be respected. If isTelemetryEnabled
reports false, even if your setting is enabled, telemetry must not be sent.
We understand that telemetry can be a sensitive topic for many users and we aim to be as transparent as possible. The core VS Code product and most first party extensions ship with a telemetry.json
file in their root. This allows a user to use the VS Code CLI with the --telemetry
flag to receive a dump of all telemetry that VS Code produces. Extension authors may include a telemetry.json
file in their root and it will also appear in the CLI dump.
✔️ Do
isTelemetryEnabled
and onDidChangeTelemetryEnabled
API.telemetry
and usesOnlineServices
if you have one.❌ Don't
telemetry.telemetryLevel
setting, as it can sometimes be incorrect compared to isTelemetryEnabled
.08/07/2025
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