GitHub Copilot adds telemetry for skills, custom agents, MCP and plugins to the usage metrics API

GitHub has expanded the usage metrics API for Copilot CLI with telemetry focused on agentic customizations – skills, custom agents, MCP servers, slash commands and plugins. The new fields totals_by_skill, totals_by_custom_agent, totals_by_mcp, totals_by_slash_cmd and totals_by_plugin list up to five of the most-used items in each category along with an interaction count (interaction_count), which, depending on the category, counts executions of skills, slash commands and plugin skills, starts of custom agents, or attempts to connect to an MCP server (for MCP, both successful and unsuccessful connection or reconnection attempts are counted, rather than individual tool calls). The additional fields distinct_skill_use_count, distinct_custom_agent_use_count, distinct_mcp_use_count, distinct_slash_cmd_use_count and distinct_plugin_use_count count the number of distinct items used – in aggregate reports, each item is counted once across the entire organization, not once per user.

The data is available in both per-user and aggregate reports at the enterprise and organization levels, specifically in 1-day reports (both per-user and aggregate), in 28-day per-user reports and in the day_totals records of aggregate 28-day reports. Access requires the View Copilot Metrics permission and the Copilot usage metrics policy to be enabled.

According to GitHub, these additions allow enterprise and organization administrators to determine which customizations in Copilot CLI are gaining popularity, identify gaps in adoption and focus investments on automations that developers actually find useful.