Disable Office Telemetry Data Collection?

Question

_{Friday, August 28, 2015 7:44 PM | 1 vote}

We have an RDS server with 8-15 users online at any given time. All of the users are on thin clients, so they run all of their Office apps from the RDS server. We are seeing very high disk I/O on the server, and looking at Resource Monitor on the server a large chunk of the I/O is caused by the OTeleData_####_##.etl files being generated by all office apps. Since there are multiple users running multiple Office apps and each instance of the app has one or more .etl files being written and/or read at any given time, the I/O is excessive.

We have imported the Office 2013 Administrative Template and applied a GPO policy in which we "Disabled" all of the settings in User Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Microsoft Office 2013\Telemetry Dashboard\

We verified via RSOP that the policy was applied, however the .etl files are still being written.

We then also set a policy to write the registry value HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\ClientTelemetry\DisableTelemetry to 1. However, as soon as any Office application is started, it resets this value back to 0.

How do we prevent Office from re-enabling telemetry data collection?

All replies (4)

_{Monday, August 31, 2015 6:23 AM}

Hi C Valdez,

You can try to use registry to disable telemetry:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\15.0\osm]
"Enablelogging"=dword:00000000
"EnableUpload"=dword:00000000

I suggest you refer to this article to get more information:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj591589.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396#Disable

Hope it's helpful.

Regards,

Emi Zhang
TechNet Community Support

It's recommended to download and install Configuration Analyzer Tool (OffCAT), which is developed by Microsoft Support teams. Once the tool is installed, you can run it at any time to scan for hundreds of known issues in Office programs. Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help, and unmark the answers if they provide no help. If you have feedback for TechNet Support, contact [email protected].

_{Tuesday, September 1, 2015 6:34 PM}

Emi,

Thank you for the reply.

We set that value, but the telemetry log files are still being generated, and the value of HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\ClientTelemetry\DisableTelemetry still gets reset to 0 on startup of any Office app.

Thank you,

-Chris

_{Monday, December 7, 2015 9:09 AM}

Hi Chris,

Bit late, but we had the same issue on a 2012R2 RDS environment with User Profile Disks enabled.
Couldn't resolve it in 2013, but when upgrading to 2016 this issue was solved.

We have O365, so we're entitled to upgrade, but of course I don't know if that's an option for your environment.

Kind regards,

Matthijs

_{Friday, July 6, 2018 8:02 AM | 4 votes}

I realize this is an old post, but if anyone is still trying to figure this one out I believe I have found the solution. 

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\ClientTelemetry]
"DisableTelemetry"=dword:00027100

You may have noticed if you set this value to 1, as recommended everywhere, it is reverted to 0 on Outlook launch. This doesn't occur with the above value and the .etl files are not created.