Operational
These categories report on the session itself rather than page content.control answers “what did my agent do.” platform is mostly Kernel acting on the VM on your behalf - saving a profile, capturing a replay, polling a recorder - so it is off by default even though the rest of this group is on. Enable it when you are debugging a profile save, a replay, or a session-setup step rather than the agent itself.
control reports one cdp_command for each supported browser-control command it can classify from the CDP proxy - input gestures, navigation, dialogs, file selection, screenshots, and every command phase, including mouseMoved, keyUp, and char. It doesn’t report arbitrary CDP traffic; general inspection traffic such as most DOM and Runtime commands isn’t classified as browser control. The command stream isn’t sampled, coalesced, or reordered.Reduce CDP command volume
Usecontrol.cdp.excluded_methods to omit high-volume methods such as Input.dispatchMouseEvent during a humanized cursor path or Page.captureScreenshot during a screencast:
cdp_disconnect, telemetry_excluded counts configured exclusions. Treat a nonzero telemetry_dropped as a telemetry-loss signal rather than using it to reconstruct the missing command sequence; the browser commands themselves still reach the browser.
Browser activity
These categories report what’s happening in the page. Capturing any of them attaches a Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) collector to the session and produces highly granular page-level events. Capturing them adds overhead, so enable only the ones you need.interaction events are browser-native DOM events observed in the page, not calls to the computer-control API (those are reported by the control category).The monitor category
monitor reports the health of the CDP collector itself: monitor_disconnected, monitor_reconnected, monitor_reconnect_failed, and monitor_init_failed.
It isn’t directly settable. It flows automatically whenever any of the browser-activity categories are captured. You can still filter the stream by monitor to isolate these events.
Data sensitivity
Telemetry is off by default. The default set isn’t limited to session metadata:control records the source you submit for Playwright execution and sanitized arguments for supported browser-control commands, while captcha can record the host and path of the page where a solve ran. The browser-activity categories capture what flows through the page, which is your own browser’s data and can include credentials and personal information.
Captured events are persisted and can be replayed by resuming the stream, so this sensitivity applies to the data at rest, not just the live stream. Events are retained for 30 days, then expired (see Retention). Treat captured telemetry - and anywhere you forward or store it - with the same care as the underlying content. For how Kernel encrypts, retains, and processes data overall, see Security and the Data Processing Addendum.
Some exposure is reduced for you automatically: input into sensitive fields such as passwords is suppressed (
interaction_key isn’t emitted for them, and interaction_click omits the element text), and cdp_command reports text lengths rather than the text itself. Beyond that, because selection is opt-in, the most effective control is to capture only the categories you need - enable network, console, page, interaction, or screenshot deliberately, and prefer the operational categories when you only need session health.
If you capture control and run Playwright code, pass credentials in through variables your snippet reads rather than as literals in the submitted source, so the captured code doesn’t carry them.