How to Opt Out of Process Name Collection

DigitalOcean Monitoring is a free, opt-in service that gathers metrics about Droplet-level resource utilization. It provides additional Droplet graphs and supports configurable metrics alert policies with integrated email Slack notifications to help you track the operational health of your infrastructure.


Our metrics agent occasionally collects process name data from users. We analyze it in aggregate to guide feature prioritization. However, you can choose to opt out of process name collection.

To do so, log in to your Droplet as root or as a user with sudo access. The commands you should execute depend on whether your operating system uses systemctl or initctl. To check, you can use commands like command -v systemctl or which systemctl, which will output a path if your system uses systemctl or output nothing if it doesn’t.

On operating systems with systemctl (like Ubuntu 16.04+, Debian, CentOS 7+, and Fedora), you need to add the --no-collector.processes flag to the end of the start command in /etc/systemd/system/do-agent.service. You can edit the file directly, or use the following sed command. Then, you need to restart the agent to put the changes into effect.

# For OSes with systemctl:
# Modify the exec command
sed -i 's%ExecStart=/opt/digitalocean/bin/do-agent%ExecStart=/opt/digitalocean/bin/do-agent --no-collector.processes%' \
/etc/systemd/system/do-agent.service
# Restart the agent
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart do-agent

On operating systems with initctl (like Ubuntu 14.04, and CentOS 6.9), you need to add the --no-collector.processes flag to the end of the exec command in /etc/init/do-agent.conf. You can edit the file directly, or use the following sed command. Then, you need to restart the agent to put the changes into effect.

# For OSes with initctl:
# Modify the exec command
sed -i 's%exec su -s /bin/sh -c \x27exec \"$0\" \"$@\"\x27 do-agent -- /opt/digitalocean/bin/do-agent --syslog%exec su -s /bin/sh -c \x27exec \"$0\" \"$@\"\x27 do-agent -- /opt/digitalocean/bin/do-agent --syslog --no-collector.processes%' \
/etc/init/do-agent.conf
# Restart the agent
sudo initctl stop do-agent
sudo initctl reload-configuration
sudo initctl start do-agent