Client telemetry user attribution and configurable capture
By Steven Van ·
Enterprise administrators can configure capture in Copilot CLI, the Copilot app and VS Code sessions using Agent Host.
Enterprise administrators can now attribute GitHub Copilot activity to individual users through managed telemetry settings while leaving prompt, response and tool content capture disabled.
User attribution
The telemetry.capture.identity setting adds three attributes to OpenTelemetry data: user.name records the authenticated Copilot account name, currently the GitHub login; process.user.name records the local operating-system account; and host.name records the local machine name. Identity capture is off by default and remains separate from the existing pseudonymous user identifier.
Independent capture controls
Administrators can independently enable five content capture classes:
- prompts: User, system and developer prompts, plus supported input context.
- responses: Assistant responses and supported reasoning content.
- toolArguments: Raw tool arguments, commands, tool schemas and identifiers for tools, MCP servers, plugins and hooks.
- toolOutput: Tool results and execution-error details.
- policyDetail: Raw policy details, such as sandbox filesystem paths.
Every capture class is off by default. Explicit managed values take precedence over local settings, SDK configuration and environment variables. The existing captureContent setting remains a legacy shorthand for the five content classes, but never enables identity capture.
Supported clients
Fine-grained capture controls are available in Copilot CLI, the GitHub Copilot app and VS Code sessions using Agent Host. Prompt, tool and policy capture can include source code, file contents, commands, tool results and workspace or user-profile paths. GitHub advises enabling only the classes needed for the audit use case and sending them to an approved collection endpoint.
Configuration is covered in the enterprise managed settings reference.
