How to configure a Symantec Protection Engine system so that no telemetry data is collected.
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How to configure a Symantec Protection Engine system so that no telemetry data is collected.

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Article ID: 157129

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Updated On:

Products

Protection Engine for Cloud Services Protection Engine for NAS

Issue/Introduction

Symantec Protection Engine includes a telemetry feature that sends installation information during clean installation, clean upgrade, upgrade with keep existing settings, and un-installation events. This data is used by Symantec to understand real customer deployment scenarios and track actual product install base.


Some customers would NOT like to send this information to Broadcom for various compliance/security reasons. This document explains the procedure to disable the feature.

Resolution

An environment variable “DISABLE_SSE_TELEMETRY” can be used on customer environment to disable the Telemetry feature completely. If this environment variable is set to “1” then the telemetry data will not be sent to Symantec Telemetry Server. If this variable is set to value other than 1 or if it does not exists then the telemetry data will be sent to Symantec Telemetry Server.

This environment variable must be set in such a way that it’s available to SSE telemetry utility during sending silent ping to Symantec Telemetry Server.

In case of Linux, Solaris we have to set it in profile files so that it’s available to telemetry utility during sending silent ping.

In case the environment variable is set to 1, the status of the telemetry ping would be set as:

TELEMETRY_DISABLED   = -9

This will indicate that the Telemetry Data is not sent to Symantec Telemetry Server.

The corresponding status message will be "SSE Telemetry is disabled. Collected data not sent to Telemetry Server"

Even if the SSE telemetry is disabled and not sent to Symantec Telemetry Server, the local telemetry data file will have the collected data along with the above status code and status message.

How to set an environment variable

To set the environment variable on each OS, please refer to each vendor's information source. Here is some useful links.
Note: These pages are not guaranteed to be permanently available, as they are not managed by Symantec.

Linux: "7.2.3. A typical set of setup files"
English: https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/linux-environment-variables

Basically, you edit /etc/profile and add the env var at the bottom.
 export DISABLE_SSE_TELEMETRY=1

 

Windows: "Configure an Environment Variable Item"
English http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772047(v=ws.10).aspx
Japanse http://technet.microsoft.com/ja-jp/library/cc772047(v=ws.10).aspx