GitHub Copilot lets enterprise admins tie telemetry to a user's GitHub login and machine name

On October 12, 2026, GitHub gave enterprise administrators a way to attribute Copilot activity to a specific person. A new managed setting, telemetry.capture.identity, adds the developer's GitHub login, local operating-system account, and machine name to the telemetry Copilot sends. GitHub says this works without collecting prompts, responses, or tool content. The setting is off by default and applies in Copilot CLI, the GitHub Copilot app, and VS Code sessions that use Agent Host.

What the identity setting adds

Copilot reports its activity through OpenTelemetry (OTel), an open standard for traces, metrics, and logs that companies route into their own monitoring systems. The administrator names the collector that receives the data in managed settings. The data already carried a pseudonymous ID, enduser.pseudo.id, and the new setting leaves it unchanged.

With identity capture on, each record gets three more attributes. user.name is the account signed in to Copilot, currently the GitHub login; process.user.name is the local operating-system account; and host.name is the machine's name. The legacy captureContent setting never turns identity on, so an administrator has to enable it explicitly.

Five switches for content

Administrators can also control five content classes one by one: prompts, model responses with supported reasoning content, raw tool arguments and commands, tool results and errors, and policy details such as sandbox filesystem paths. Every class starts off. Values set in managed settings take precedence over local settings, SDK configuration, and environment variables, so a local setting cannot override them.

The older captureContent setting still works as a shorthand for all five content classes. GitHub warns that prompt, tool, and policy capture can include source code, file contents, commands, tool results, and workspace or user-profile paths. It advises turning on only the classes an audit needs and sending them to an approved collection endpoint.