Telemetry

It is off

A default Adminium install makes no outbound requests to Adminium. No analytics, no license check, no phone-home, no “anonymous usage statistics” that are on until you find the setting.

This is not a preference we hope you keep. It is the default because the product is AGPL-3.0 software running on your infrastructure, and software on your infrastructure should not report to its author unless you asked it to.

The two controls

Telemetry has one switch with two places to set it, and the environment outranks the screen:

Control	Where	Wins?
Share anonymous usage data	The first-run wizard, or PUT /api/v1/settings/telemetry	Only when ADMINIUM_TELEMETRY is unset
ADMINIUM_TELEMETRY	The process environment	Always, when set

Turning it on

Answer yes on the first-run consent screen. That is the normal path, and it is all a single self-hosted instance needs.

Enforcing an answer for the whole deployment

ADMINIUM_TELEMETRY=off   # nothing is ever sent, whatever anyone clicks
ADMINIUM_TELEMETRY=on    # always sent, without waiting for the wizard

Accepts on, true, 1 (and off, false, 0). Leave it unset unless you mean to override the consent screen — unset is not “off”, it is “let the answer stand”, and that is what you want on a normal install.

Set it if you are the operator of a fleet and the answer is not the wizard’s to give: ADMINIUM_TELEMETRY=off in your compose file or unit file is a hard veto that a user clicking “yes” cannot lift.

What Adminium connects to when telemetry is off

Worth stating explicitly, because “off” should mean off:

	Connects out?
Telemetry	No
License / activation check	No — there is none
Fonts, icons, assets	No — all bundled, no CDN
Your source database	Yes, obviously
Your meta store	Yes
An LLM provider	Only if you configured a key, and never on the BYO path
Update check	Only if enabled

An air-gapped Adminium is a supported configuration, not a workaround.

The AGPL and the About screen

Adminium is AGPL-3.0. Section 13 requires that users interacting with a modified version over a network can obtain its source. The About screen carries the version, the license, and the source offer — which is how a self-hosted instance satisfies that obligation for its own users.

If you modify Adminium and let others use it over a network, that offer needs to point at your source. Do not remove the About screen; it is doing a job.

Update checks are a separate consent

A self-hosted instance can check whether a newer version exists and show a notice on the About screen. That is a network request — to api.github.com, disclosing this instance’s public IP and its version — and it has its own switch, which telemetry does not govern:

	Setting	Default	Asked where
Telemetry	telemetry.enabled	off	First-run consent screen
Update check	updates.checkEnabled	off	First-run consent screen (separate question)

Both are off by default and each is answered on its own. Turning telemetry off does not turn the update check off — if you answered yes to the update question, the check keeps running. They are separate because they disclose different things to different parties, so inheriting one consent from the other would be assuming an answer nobody gave.

Both are revisited on the same endpoint, which writes both keys at once — so turning one off means sending the other’s current value with it:

# both off
curl -X PUT https://your-instance/api/v1/settings/telemetry \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"telemetry": false, "updateCheck": false}'

Requires the settings.manage permission, and the change is written to the audit log.

ADMINIUM_TELEMETRY does not cover the update check — it is the telemetry switch, exactly as its name says. updates.checkEnabled is the only control for the update check.

Nothing is ever downloaded or installed automatically, whichever way these are set. Upgrades are yours to perform: Upgrading.

LLM providers are a separate question

If you configure a provider key, Adminium calls that provider — that is what you configured it to do. That is unrelated to telemetry and is not governed by ADMINIUM_TELEMETRY.

If you want AI assist with no network I/O at all, the BYO round-trip is exactly that: Adminium writes a prompt to a file and stops.