Metrics Collection

Collection of metrics from servers that use your plugin can be an incredibly useful tool for knowing what direction to take your plugin in. However, the Ore Plugin Submission Guidelines (under External Connections) state that plugins may only collect metrics if informed consent has been granted. Such consent must be opt-in, metrics collection must be off by default.

To simplify gathering consent, Sponge provides an API that allow plugins to check for this consent in a central way.

Metrics collection consent is on a per-plugin basis. Plugins must not assume that consent for one plugin means consent for all.

Obtaining Consent

In order to gain consent from server owners, plugins may request that server owners enable metrics. This can be of the form of a message on startup instructing the players that they can enable metrics by updating the configuration option in configuration files. SpongeForge and SpongeVanilla also provide the /sponge metrics <pluginid> enable command.

Plugins may prompt server owners to run the command or allow for a “one click” enable in game.

Warning

Plugins may not run the /sponge metrics <pluginid> enable command without a server owner’s informed consent. Doing so will cause a plugin to be rejected from the Ore platform.

Note

The /sponge metrics command is only guaranteed to exist on the SpongeForge and SpongeVanilla server implementations. Other implementations, such as Lantern, may not include this command.

Checking for Consent

The MetricsConfigManager allows you to determine if your plugin has gained consent to send metrics. This can either be injected into your plugin class, or obtained via Sponge#getMetricsConfigManager() object on demand.

Every time your plugin wishes to send metrics, you must check the MetricsConfigManager#getCollectionState(PluginContainer), supplying the PluginContainer of your plugin. Metrics must only be sent if this returns Tristate#TRUE for your plugin.

The following example shows how to use field injections to get the MetricsConfigManager and the PluginContainer for your plugin, and uses those to determine whether consent to send metrics has been obtained.

Example

import com.google.inject.Inject;
import org.spongepowered.api.plugin.PluginContainer;
import org.spongepowered.api.util.metric.MetricsConfigManager;

@Inject
private PluginContainer container;

@Inject
private MetricsConfigManager metricsConfigManager;

public boolean hasConsent() {
    return this.metricsConfigManager.getCollectionState(this.container).asBoolean();
}