What XrmGhost collects

What XrmGhost collects, and how to turn it off

XrmGhost runs your Dataverse plugins on your machine. Most of what it does never leaves that machine. This page lists every piece of data that does, one field per row, with why we need it and how long we keep it. If a field is not on this page, we do not collect it; if you find one that is missing, tell us at legal@xrmghost.tech and we will treat it as a bug.

This page describes XrmGhost CLI 1.7.7 and Framework Host 1.1.0. When a release changes what is sent, this page changes in the same release.

Two words we use carefully:

• Pseudonymous means the data does not carry your name, but it is linked to a stable identifier (your Platform ID). It is still personal data, and we treat it as such.
• Anonymous means it cannot be linked back to you. Very little of what a CLI sends is anonymous, so we do not use the word for product telemetry.

Quick answers

Question	Answer
Can I turn off telemetry?	Yes: XRMGHOST_TELEMETRY=0. See Turning it off.
Does XrmGhost read my plugin code or my Dataverse data?	No. Your plugins run locally; no plugin code, no plugin output and no Dataverse records are sent to us. The diagnostics of a run are limited to the fixed list in Run diagnostics.
Is my username or machine name sent?	Not in clear. A one-way hash of each is sent at registration (see the note on hashing below).
Is my IP address stored?	Not in our tables. Our servers see it on every connection, use it to rate-limit requests, and write it to service logs only when a rate limit triggers. Those logs are kept 30 days.
What changes when an AI agent runs xg?	Each telemetry record says whether a person, an agent or a CI pipeline ran the command, and which agent. Nothing else. See Agents and XRMGHOST_ACTOR.
What happens to my account data when I delete my account?	We keep it for audit for 24 months, then anonymise it. See Account data.

1. Machine registration (always on)

Every time xg starts (except xg --version), it registers the installation with XrmGhost servers. This is what makes licensing work, and it is not affected by XRMGHOST_TELEMETRY=0.

Field	Example	Why	Kept for
Platform ID	3fa85f64… (random GUID, created on first run, stored in machine_id.dat)	Identifies the installation; links a license to it	until you ask us to delete it
Machine name (hashed)	SHA-256 of MachineName:<your machine name>	Tell installations apart; detect duplicate registrations	same
User name (hashed)	SHA-256 of UserName:<your OS user>	same	same
User domain (hashed)	SHA-256 of UserDomainName:<your domain>	same	same
OS description	Microsoft Windows 10.0.22631	Compatibility and support	same
.NET runtime description	.NET 9.0.0	Compatibility	same
XrmGhost CLI version	1.7.7	Know which versions are in use	same

Our server adds the time of the first and of the latest registration, so that we know whether an installation is still active. The CLI does not send a timestamp of its own.

A note on hashing. The three names are hashed on your machine before they are sent, so we never receive them in clear. The hash has no secret key, which means that someone who already knows your user name could compute the same value and recognise it. That is why we call these fields pseudonymous, not anonymous.

Duplicate installations. Deleting machine_id.dat creates a new Platform ID. To count installations correctly, our servers compute a second hash over the three hashed names above and use it to recognise a reinstall on the same machine. That hash is computed only from fields already listed here; it adds nothing new from your machine.

2. Usage telemetry (on by default, can be turned off)

After each command, xg writes one small record and sends it. The fields are fixed by an allowlist in the code; a field that is not on the list is dropped before the record is written.

Field	Example	Why	Kept for
Event type	command_usage	Tell this record from a run diagnostic	24 months
Timestamp	2026-10-19T08:12:04Z	Order records in time	24 months
Platform ID	3fa85f64…	Count installations, not commands	24 months
Trace ID	random	Group the records of one command	24 months
Command	run, doctor, env add	Know which commands are used	24 months
Command type	Standard, Authenticated, FeatureGated	Group commands by whether they need a login or a licensed feature	24 months
Result and exit code	success, 0	Know what fails	24 months
Duration	1834 ms	Find slow commands	24 months
CLI version	1.7.7	Know which versions fail	24 months
Release channel	prod or dev	Separate stable builds from prereleases. A build constant, not personal data	24 months
Surface	cli.command_usage	A constant that marks the record as a CLI usage record	24 months
Setup reason code	host_missing, netfx_missing	Know why a first run could not set the plugin host up. Only a fixed list of codes is allowed	24 months
Error type	TimeoutException	Diagnose failures of the CLI itself	24 months
Error message	Connection to … timed out	Diagnose failures of the CLI itself. This is free text produced by the error, and it can contain a file path or your Dataverse environment URL.	24 months
Actor	human, agent, ci, unknown	Measure who runs the CLI. See Agents and XRMGHOST_ACTOR	24 months
Agent name	claude-code, codex, other, … (only when actor is agent)	same	24 months
Is CI	true / false	same	24 months

Records are deleted from our storage 24 months after they are received.

3. Run diagnostics (xg run only)

When you run a plugin, xg also sends a second record set: the timings and outcome of that run, on the CLI side and on the plugin host side, so that we can diagnose failures of the runner itself. Like section 2, it is filtered by an allowlist before it leaves your machine, and it is turned off by the same XRMGHOST_TELEMETRY=0.

Field	Example	Why	Kept for
Timestamp, trace ID, span IDs	random	Join the CLI and host side of one run	24 months
Command, result, exit code, duration, CLI version, release channel, Platform ID	as in section 2	same as in section 2	24 months
License tier at run time	Pro, licensed yes/no	Know which tiers use which features	24 months
Gating decision	allow / degrade / deny, reason code, who decided (host), mode (strict / compat)	Diagnose license and feature checks	24 months
Surface	cli.run on the CLI side, Pro.FrameworkHost.PluginExecution on the host side	Know which licensed feature was checked	24 months
Correlation ID	GUID from your scenario file, or random	Join the CLI and host side of one run	24 months
Entitlement hand-off	whether the license context was handed to the host, why not, and a hash of it; whether the trace header was sent	Diagnose license checks between CLI and host	24 months
Host span name, kind and status	plugin.execute, Server, Ok / Error	Find which step of the run failed	24 months
gRPC method and status code	/PluginRunner/ExecutePlugin, OK	Find transport failures between CLI and host	24 months
Plugin timing and outcome	plugin.duration_ms=212, plugin.outcome=success	Find slow or failing runs	24 months
Whether the host verified the license	true / false	Diagnose license checks	24 months
Error type (CLI side only)	RpcException	Diagnose failures of the runner	24 months

What is never sent. The allowlist leaves out everything that identifies your code or your data: the plugin type name, the assembly file name and its hash, the scenario name, your plugin’s trace output (ITracingService), the host’s framework traces, the exception type and message raised by your plugin, internal error details and stack frames, the unsecure or secure configuration, file paths, the gRPC peer address, and any Dataverse record. The host’s own flags for CI and interactive sessions stay on your machine too.

Some of these fields are written to the local telemetry file on your machine (section 4), so that you can read them when a run fails; they are filtered out before anything is sent.

4. On your machine only

These files are written locally and are not sent to us, except as described above.

File	Location	What	How long
machine_id.dat	%LOCALAPPDATA%\XrmGhost\XrmGhostCli\	Platform ID	until you delete it
first-run.sentinel	same	when the privacy notice was shown, and by which CLI version	until you delete it
telemetry\telemetry-YYYY-MM-DD.json	same	the full local trace of each command and run, including the fields of section 3 that are never sent; readable by you	20 days
telemetry\outbox\	same	records waiting to be sent (sections 2 and 3, already filtered)	until sent; after 8 failed attempts an item moves to outbox\dead-letter\, capped at 200 items
akms_api.key, bootstrap.lic	same	your API key and the bootstrap key used to activate it	until it expires or you delete it
d365_environments.json, environments_secure\	same	your environment URLs and client secrets	until you remove the environment

The key and secret files are encrypted with your Windows account (DPAPI, current user): another user on the same machine cannot read them.

To compute a local encryption key, xg reads your network adapters’ MAC addresses, OS description, processor count and user name. That value stays in memory and is never sent.

Turning it off

To turn telemetry off for good, set the variable for your user account:

setx XRMGHOST_TELEMETRY 0

setx writes the value to your user environment; it applies to every new terminal you open from then on (the terminal you ran it in keeps its old environment until you open a new one). If you only want to turn telemetry off for the session you are in, $env:XRMGHOST_TELEMETRY = "0" (PowerShell) or set XRMGHOST_TELEMETRY=0 (Command Prompt) does that, and the setting is gone when you close the window.

For IT administrators. To turn telemetry off on every machine you manage, deploy XRMGHOST_TELEMETRY with the value 0 as a system environment variable through Group Policy or Intune. xg and the plugin host read it like any other environment variable, so no extra configuration of XrmGhost is needed, and users cannot miss it by opening a different shell.

	With XRMGHOST_TELEMETRY=0
Usage telemetry (section 2)	not collected, not queued, not sent
Run diagnostics (section 3)	not collected, not sent, on the CLI side and on the host side
Local telemetry files (section 4)	no new files; files already on disk stay there, unsent, until you delete them
Machine registration (section 1)	still on: licensing depends on it
License and API-key checks	still on

• Only the exact value 0 turns telemetry off. false, no, off or an empty value leave it on.
• Records queued before you opted out are not sent while the variable is set. If you remove the variable later, they may be sent. To discard them, delete the telemetry folder.
• xg privacy prints a summary of this page and your current Platform ID. It is an ordinary command: it registers the installation at startup like every other command and, unless you have opted out, produces one usage record of its own.

Account data

If you create an account on the portal, we hold the data you give us there (name, email, billing details) and the record of your licences and payments. When you delete your account, that data is not removed at once: we keep it for audit purposes for 24 months from your last sign-in or from the deletion of your account, whichever comes later, so that we can answer questions about past licences, invoices and payments. When that period ends, the record is anonymised: name and email are blanked, and what stays is a licence and payment history that cannot be linked back to you. Invoices themselves are kept for as long as tax law requires, by Stripe and by us.

Agents and XRMGHOST_ACTOR

The first-run privacy notice is shown only on an interactive terminal, so an agent never sees it. If you install XrmGhost for an agent, this page is the notice: point the agent’s instructions at it, or set XRMGHOST_TELEMETRY in the agent’s environment.

Each telemetry record carries three fields that say who drove the command, and nothing else about the agent:

Field	Values	How it is decided
actor	human, agent, ci, unknown	--actor option, then XRMGHOST_ACTOR, then a known agent variable in the environment, then CI variables, then an interactive console (human); a plain pipe or script is unknown, not agent
agent_name	claude-code, codex, copilot-cli, opencode, pi, gemini-cli, cursor, cline, mcp, other	only when actor is agent; any name outside the list becomes other
is_ci	true / false	from CI, GITHUB_ACTIONS, TF_BUILD, GITLAB_CI, BUILDKITE, JENKINS_URL, TEAMCITY_VERSION, BUILD_BUILDID

The agent is recognised from variables that agents set themselves (CLAUDECODE, AI_AGENT, PI_CODING_AGENT, GEMINI_CLI, CODEX_SANDBOX, CURSOR_AGENT, CLINE_ACTIVE). We read whether they are set, not their contents, and we never send their values. The fields are counted, nothing more: no command behaves differently because of them.

XRMGHOST_ACTOR=human removes the agent marker and nothing else: records still carry actor=human and is_ci. To send none of these fields, use XRMGHOST_TELEMETRY=0.

Services we use

Service	For	Data it receives
Microsoft Azure (West Europe)	hosting of the licensing service, telemetry storage, service logs (30 days)	everything in sections 1–3; IP addresses in rate-limit logs
Microsoft Dataverse	customer accounts, subscriptions	account and billing data
Microsoft Entra / Microsoft account	sign-in to the portal	your Microsoft sign-in identity
Microsoft 365 / Exchange Online	transactional email (password reset, renewal notices)	your email and name
GitHub	sign-in to the portal; hosting of the documentation; download of the plugin host by xg	your GitHub identity; IP address on download and page visits
Stripe	payments and invoices	name, email, billing address, tax ID, payment method
Pirsch (Germany)	cookieless statistics on www.xrmghost.tech and docs.xrmghost.tech	page visits without cookies or persistent identifiers

This page and the Privacy Policy

This page is the technical notice: what xg sends, why, for how long, and how to turn it off. The Privacy Policy is the legal document: who is responsible for your data, on what legal basis it is processed, your rights, and where it is transferred. The two agree with each other, and where they say the same thing in different words, the Privacy Policy prevails.