Manage Participation in CEIP

VMware’s Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) is a voluntary program that collects information about how people use our products.

The data collected may include device identifiers and information that identifies your users. This data is collected to enable VMware to diagnose and improve its products and services, fix product issues, provide proactive technical support, and to advise you on how to best deploy and use our products. Data is collected using the open source Sonobuoy library.

When you deploy a management cluster by using either the installer interface or the CLI, participation in the VMware Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) is enabled by default, unless you specify the option to opt out. If you remain opted in to the program, the management cluster sends data to VMware at regular intervals. This data is collected to enable VMware to diagnose and improve its products and services, fix product issues, provide proactive technical support, and to advise you on how to best deploy and use our products.

If you opt in to CEIP, management clusters send the following information to VMware:

The number of workload clusters that you deploy.
The infrastructure, network, and storage providers that you use.
The time that it takes for the tanzu CLI to perform basic operations such as cluster create, cluster delete, cluster scale, and cluster upgrade.
The Tanzu Kubernetes Grid packages that you implement.
The plans that you use to deploy clusters, as well as the number and configuration of the control plane and worker nodes.
The versions of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and Kubernetes that you use.
The type and size of the workloads that your clusters run, as well as their lifespan.
Whether or not you integrate Tanzu Kubernetes Grid with Tanzu Mission Control or VMware Aria Operations for Applications.
The nature of any problems, errors, and failures that you encounter when using Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, so that we can identify which areas of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid need to be made more robust.

Opt In or Opt Out of the VMware CEIP

If you opted out of the CEIP when you deployed a management cluster and want to opt in, or if you opted in and want to opt out, you can change your CEIP participation setting after deployment.

CEIP runs as a cronjob on the management cluster. It does not run on workload clusters. The cronjob checks the configmap vmware-telemetry-cluster-ceip found in the vmware-system-telemetry namespace to determine if it should collect data or not.

See CEIP Status

To see the management cluster’s current CEIP status:

Export the kubeconfig targeting your management cluster to an environment variable, KUBECONFIG.
```
export KUBECONFIG=~/.kube/config
```
Run the tanzu telemetry participation status command to see the CEIP status of the current management cluster, for example:
```
tanzu telemetry participation status
```
```
- ceip: |
    level: disabled
  shared_identifiers: ...
```
The output ceip.level listing indicates CEIP status:
- standard, or no status listed: CEIP participation is enabled on a management cluster and it sends telemetry data. This is the default behavior.
- disabled: CEIP participation is deactivated.

Opt In to CEIP

To activate CEIP participation on a management cluster on which it is currently deactivated:

Run the tanzu telemetry participation update --CEIP-opt-in command.
```
tanzu telemetry participation update --CEIP-opt-in
```
To verify that the CEIP participation is now active, run tanzu telemetry participation status again.

The status should now be standard.
```
- ceip: |
    level: standard
  shared_identifiers: ...
```
You can also check that the CEIP cronjob is running by setting the kubectl context to the management cluster and running kubectl get cronjobs -A. For example:
```
kubectl config use-context my-mgmt-cluster-admin@my-mgmt-cluster
```
```
kubectl get cronjobs -A
```
The output shows that the tkg-telemetry job is running:
```
NAMESPACE              NAME            SCHEDULE      SUSPEND   ACTIVE   LAST SCHEDULE   AGE
tkg-system-telemetry   tkg-telemetry   0 */6 * * *   False     0        <none>          18s
```

Opt Out of CEIP

To deactivate CEIP participation on a management cluster on which it is currently activated:

Run the tanzu telemetry participation update --CEIP-opt-out command.
```
tanzu telemetry participation update --CEIP-opt-out
```
To verify that the CEIP participation is deactivated, run tanzu telemetry participation status again.

The status should now be disabled.
```
- ceip: |
    level: disabled
  shared_identifiers: ...
```
CEIP being deactivated does not remove the cron job from the management cluster. The cron job is responsible for checking if CEIP is deactivated/activated. The job should log that whether it is not collecting telemetry. To verify if the cron job is sending telemetry or not, we need to check the logs of the pod created by the telemetry cron job.

Run the following command to view all pods in the telemetry namespace:

kubectl get pods -n tkg-system-telemetry

The output should look something like:

NAME                             READY   STATUS      RESTARTS   AGE
tkg-telemetry-1657519200-l8k9x   0/1     Completed   0          14h
tkg-telemetry-1657540800-j4dzw   0/1     Completed   0          8h
tkg-telemetry-1657562400-pj826   0/1     Completed   0          125m

Pick the most recent completed pod and check its logs using the following command:

kubectl logs pods/tkg-telemetry-1657562400-pj826 -n tkg-system-telemetry

The logs should contain the following lines, indicating that no data was collected

2022-07-11T16:01:52.686-0400  INFO  CEIP.config vmware/ceip_validator.go:77  loaded config  {"cluster[level]": "disabled"}
2022-07-11T16:01:52.686-0400  INFO  tkg-telemetry/main.go:57  cluster is opted out of telemetry, aborting collection

Add Entitlement Account Number and Environment Type to Telemetry Profile

Platform operators can use the Tanzu CLI to add an Entitlement Account Number (EAN) and environment type to a telemetry profile.

The EAN is a unique nine-digit number associated with an account. Adding an EAN to a telemetry profile allows all the information collected by CEIP to be associated with that account and allows your account team to create reports for the account.

VMware recommends that you use your EAN for all product and support interactions. If you do not provide an EAN, a new EAN may be created for the interaction.

To add an EAN and environment type to a telemetry profile:

Identify the Entitlement Account Number
Update the Management Cluster

Identify the Entitlement Account Number

If you do not know the EAN, use one of the following methods to find it.

Find the EAN from VMware Customer Connect
Find the EAN from the Partner Connect Portal

Find the EAN from Customer Connect

In a web browser, navigate to VMware Customer Connect and log in.

Find the EAN from Customer Connect in one of the following ways:

From Account Summary:
1. On the Home page, click the Manage Accounts quick link.
2. Select Accounts > Account Summary.
3. On the Account Summary page, locate the account and record the EAN.
From License Keys:
1. In the top menu bar, click Accounts > License Keys.
2. On the License Keys page, locate the account and record the EAN.

Find the EAN from the Partner Connect Portal

Find the EAN from Partner Connect:

In a web browser, navigate to the VMware Partner Portal and log in.

If you are a new user, register with Partner Connect. For more information about registering, see How to register with Partner Connect in the VMware knowledge base.
In the top menu bar, click Incentives > Advantage Plus and select Entitlement Account Lookup.
Update the Customer Name and Country fields, then click Search. In the results, locate the account and record the EAN.

Update the Management Cluster

Add the EAN and environment type to the telemetry profile, then confirm the CEIP status.

To add the EAN and environment type to the telemetry profile, run:
```
tanzu telemetry metadata update --entitlement-account-number "MY-EAN" --env-is-prod true
```
Where:
- MY-EAN is the Entitlement Account Number.
To verify that the EAN has been added, run:
```
tanzu telemetry metadata status
```

Confirm that the output from this command shows the CEIP status as standard, and that the EAN appears under shared_identifiers

- ceip: |
    level: standard
  shared_identifiers: |
    ...
    customer_entitlement_account_number: <MY-EAN>
    env_is_prod: "true"