Phone Home

All Payara Platform distributions report back a limited amount of information about their specific configuration at launch time. No sensitive data about your machine or specific usage of Payara Server is sent to 0s or any member of the Payara Services team.

Gathered phone home data is sent via a GET request to http://www.payara.fish/phonehome

The following is the list of information attributes gathered by the Phone Home service:

Attribute Example

Payara Server Version

5.41.0 #badassfish

Java Virtual Machine Version

1.8.0_121

Domain Uptime

36500

Number of nodes in the domain

1

Number of instances in the domain

2

Randomly generated UUID

eaa6fe2c-2388-4aa7-fdcc-288c7b318ddfeaa6ef23-2388-4aa7-8dcc-288c7b318ddf

This is the only data which the phone home service gathers from your system.

The UUID is specific to the DAS and is randomly generated on startup, so it is not machine specific.

What is the data used for?

The phone home data is presently used to gather usage statistics about the corresponding distribution, such as how long users typically run instances, and what versions they use.

Previously this could only be done at an extremely simple level from downloads over time, giving us no idea how Payara Server is used beyond specific interactions with contributors and customers which may not accurately represent the state of our user base.

The phone home service was designed as a non-intrusive survey tool which would only gather data specific to Payara and has no contact with any running applications, or indeed anything on your machine other than the mentioned attributes.

Disabling and Enabling Phone Home

The phone home service is enabled by default when starting a Payara Server or Payara Micro. The phone home service can be easily disabled in the following ways.

Enable the Phone Home service

asadmin> enable-phone-home

Disable the Phone Home service

Using Asadmin

Run this asadmin command and then restart the server to disable PhoneHome

asadmin> disable-phone-home

Disable by Removing The Service Module

  • Navigate to the ${PAYARA_INSTALL_DIR}/glassfish/modules directory

  • Delete the phonehome-bootstrap.jar module.

List the current status of the Phone Home service.

asadmin> list-phone-home