Deleting diagnostics data
Important
Visual Studio App Center is scheduled for retirement on March 31, 2025. While you can continue to use Visual Studio App Center until it is fully retired, there are several recommended alternatives that you may consider migrating to.
Data Subject Requests (DSRs) to be forgotten must be serviced within 30 days. App Center Diagnostics retains raw data for 28 days by default. There are two possible starting points:
- You don't have a mapping of your user IDs to install IDs.
- You have a mapping of your user IDs to install IDs.
In both cases, once you have the install IDs of the user, you should delete the associated diagnostics data. Details for both cases are in the sections below.
You don't have a mapping of your user IDs to install IDs
If you didn't keep a mapping between your user IDs and install IDs, you must follow some extra steps, described in the following subsections.
- Export diagnostics data to Blob Storage.
- Search for personal data within the exported information in Azure Blob Storage.
- Locate the install IDs.
Export diagnostics data to Blob Storage
To export your diagnostics data to Azure Blob Storage, call the following App Center API:
POST https://api.appcenter.ms/v0.1/apps/{owner_name}/{app_name}/export_configurations
Additional details are available in the export API documentation.
Use the following payload to export your crashes to Azure Blob Storage:
{
"type" : "blob_storage_linked_subscription",
"subscription_id": "<Your-Azure-Subscription-ID",
"export_entities": [ "crashes" ]
}
To find the location in blob storage, you can call the following App Center API:
GET https://api.appcenter.ms/v0.1/apps/{owner_name}/{app_name}/export_configurations
Additional details are available in the export configurations list API documentation.
Search for personal data within the exported information in Azure Blob Storage
Search within your exported diagnostics data in Azure Blob Storage for any occurrences of the personal information stored in the crash or error log.
Locate the install IDs
Locate the install ID for the diagnostics logs that contain personal information. Learn more in the application install ID documentation. Now that you have the install IDs, you can delete the diagnostic data.
You have a mapping of your user IDs to install IDs
If you keep a mapping between your user IDs and their App Center install IDs, you can directly use them to block and delete the data of interest.
Delete diagnostics data
Once you have the install IDs for the user associated with the DSR, you should go ahead and delete the existing data as well as block new data from coming in.
Block incoming diagnostics data by install ID
Stop processing incoming diagnostics data for a given install ID, call the following App Center API for each install ID:
PUT https://api.appcenter.ms/v0.1/apps/{owner_name}/{app_name}/devices/block_logs/{install_id}
Additional details are available in the analytics API documentation. Call this API for every device (install ID) on which your user has installed your app.
Delete diagnostics data by install ID
To delete the diagnostics data associated with an install ID, call the following App Center API:
DELETE https://api.appcenter.ms/v0.1/apps/{owner_name}/{app_name}/errors/errorGroups/{errorGroupId}/errors/{errorId}
For this API call, you must specify the crash/error ID, the crash/error group ID, the owner name, and the name of the app.