scopy opt in - end user usage monitoring

[rgetz]

In order to see what instruments people are using, and what we should focus on more, we need to have the option for an opt-in, automatic statistics gathering. This could capture things like:

time each, and how long each instrument is "run", uptime of the device (how long it's plugged into USB)
operating system, screen resolution, memory usage
scopy version, hardware version, firmware version
country (if possible)
Where you click (to see if there are common clicks everyone does in a certain order)
min/max max temp of the zynq and ADC
basic info about specific instruments,
ie - function generator - which waveform are being used, what voltages, what frequencies
spectrum analyzer, what start/stop frequencies
Crash information would be a good one as well.

Firefox/Mozilla already does this, and calls it telemetry :

https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/telemetry/telemetry/
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Data_Collection#Requesting_Approval
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/send-usage-data-firefox-mobile-devices
Chrome "Usage statistics and crash reports":
https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/whitepaper.html
There is a discussion on how Microsoft encourages developers to do this at:
https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2014/03/20/instrumenting-your-app-for-telemetry-and-analytics/
A great white paper talking about how google implement crowdsourcing statistics from end-user client software, anonymously, with strong privacy guarantees is at:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.6981
and code is at (where there is a cpp client):
https://github.com/google/rappor
I think this would make a great co-op project ???

-Robin

[rgetz]

This might be a good project to look at to do this : https://opentelemetry.io/