User reports broken at https://portal.azure.com

[phaumer]

I upgraded our extension from using "vscode-extension-telemetry": "0.4.3" to "@vscode/extension-telemetry": "0.9.6".

Now when I log on to my Application Insight dashboard at https://portal.azure.com I am not able to run the User reports anymore. I can see that since I switched the library that those events do not have user information anymore. In the transaction search I was able to select any event and review the users timeline. With the data coming from the new library all the usr-related shortcuts are gone.

I consider this a major regression as I am not able to collect statistics about the number of unique users we have over time and how many user are using specific features anymore.

[lramos15]

This is a duplicate of #197

It sounds like maybe it's worth adding a flag for this information. VS Code tries to avoid PII in every place possible which includes this library. Instead we recommend custom queries utilizing common.vscodemachineid to identify unique users. However, this does not work with the pre-built users feature.

[phaumer]

Thanks @lramos15. I reopend it, because I felt that without user reports that the value telemetry is massively diminished and requires brainstorming about alternatives.

If you have machineid then why not report that value also for the userid so the dashboard user reports work again. The number of users that share the same machine is neglectable imho. Even for Codespaces I would would be fine with different ids for different workspaces as our telemetry show that desktop VS Code is the massive majority. Not being able to report on unique user trends defeats the whole purpose of telemetry imho as that is the statistic management wants to know.

[lramos15]

If you have machineid then why not report that value also for the userid so the dashboard user reports work again

This is what I would like to do, just need to figure out what property to assign it to in the App insights constructor