[lopkeny12ko]

This has never made any sense to me. I'm surprised this isn't a massive red flag from anyone on HN.

Running a production-grade service with zero metrics and logs? If there's an outage, or even something as mundane as a VM failing to provision, you're telling me that Mullvad developers just shrug and say "well, we can't do anything, because there's no logs!"

I don't use a third party VPN, but if I wanted to, "we deliberately eschew all observability" is not a positive selling point.

[CydeWeys]

Who said they don't have metrics? The VPN servers don't have any storage, but they can still send metrics to an off-machine API, or a different server that does have storage can send requests to the VPN servers and do metrics that way.

Ditto for logging. They claim to not log activity over the VPN itself, but I don't see any claims about not logging more mundane infra stuff like "a VM failed to provision". I think you're arguing here against claims they aren't making.

[portpecos]

> but they can still send metrics to an off-machine API

And that would be the next most interesting post, imo. A post about how they metric and log in a RAM-only environment while obscuring or obfuscating the details that could lead to “compromise”. Even if the answer is something so simple like “we regex and discard this out”, I would feel more trusting of their services.

[eddythompson80]

Yes, because it’s a simple service (VPN) that hasn’t added a billion nonesense features over time. You can log VM provisioning and health logs but as long as you don’t log any wireguard logs or user provisioning logs you’re good.

[klysm]

you can send logs and metrics over the network. the important part to users is not logging the traffic info

[lopkeny12ko]

Sending them over the network to where? "We don't store logs" means they certainly aren't being ingested into any persistent storage. I'm highly interested in how one can run time-series queries over /dev/null.

[CydeWeys]

They never said "We don't store logs". What they said is they don't keep logs of user activity. You're arguing against a strawman.

https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy/

[klysm]

you are conflating logs & metrics with user activity logs.

[blackoil]

Metrics are mostly by nature anonymous. Things measured are CPU/Mem usage, network rate. Metrics at IP/user level aren't of much value. Companies add country/device type attr. but they can be done without.

Logs can similarly be of system events only.