Spinnaker Stats is a telemetry collection service that gathers usage data from customer Spinnaker instances to inform the project's development priorities and understand real-world product adoption.
The service solves the problem of understanding how Spinnaker is deployed and used across the community. It collects telemetry from running instances, aggregating this data to help maintainers and contributors identify where to focus engineering efforts. The approach is straightforward: customer instances send telemetry to a centralized endpoint, which processes and stores the data for analysis.
Organizations running Spinnaker should adopt this service if they want to contribute anonymized usage insights back to the project community. The tool suits any Spinnaker deployment where operators are willing to share telemetry. The project maintains a public website documenting what data is collected and how to request access to the raw dataset, making the data collection transparent to users.
Development follows a staging-to-production promotion model where all commits to the main branch deploy automatically to a staging environment, and production deployments occur through explicit promotion triggered by release tags. The service maintains independent release cycles from Spinnaker itself, since a single endpoint serves all Spinnaker versions. Infrastructure and data storage are centralized in a dedicated cloud project, simplifying operational management.
