Agentic CLI customizations now in the usage metrics API

Published September 17, 2026 · Category: AI Create

Overview

GitHub Copilot expands existing CLI report coverage with agentic activity metrics for skills, custom agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, slash commands, and plugins.

What’s new

The fields appear in enterprise and organization per-user and aggregate 1-day reports, per-user 28-day reports, and the day_totals entries in aggregate 28-day reports.

Details

In a per-user report, the fields answer two questions about that user’s activity. In an aggregate report, they answer the same questions across the enterprise or organization:

• Which items are used most? The totals_by_skill, totals_by_custom_agent, totals_by_mcp, totals_by_slash_cmd, and totals_by_plugin arrays list up to five items with the most recorded activity. Each entry includes an interaction_count. Depending on the category, this counts invocations for skills, slash commands, and plugin skills, plus custom agent starts and MCP server connection attempts.
• How many different items were used? The distinct_skill_use_count, distinct_custom_agent_use_count, distinct_mcp_use_count, distinct_slash_cmd_use_count, and distinct_plugin_use_count fields count the number of different items used. In a per-user report, each item that user used counts once. In an aggregate report, each item used by anyone in the enterprise or organization counts once, not once per user. These counts include items outside the top five, and comparing them over time shows whether the variety of items in use is growing.

Why this matters

Enterprise and organization administrators are now able to identify which Copilot CLI customizations are gaining traction, find enablement gaps, and focus investment on automations that developers find valuable.

Important notes

• Names for recognized GitHub-provided items are shown. To protect privacy, customer-defined names are not shown. Skills, custom agents, MCP servers, and plugins are grouped under other. Copilot CLI telemetry already groups customer-defined slash commands under custom, so reports use that label for slash commands.
• For MCP servers, interaction_count increases only when Copilot CLI attempts to connect or reconnect to the server. Successful and failed attempts both count. Calling tools from the same connected server multiple times does not increase the count.
• Plugin metrics count only skill invocations associated with a plugin. Every plugin interaction therefore also appears in the skill totals, but skill interactions that do not come from a plugin appear only in the skill totals. Because the plugin totals are a subset of the skill totals, you should not add the two together.
• Empty arrays and zero counts indicate no matching activity. The fields are null or absent when customization data is unavailable.
• Reports are available to enterprise owners and billing managers, organization owners, and anyone with a custom organization or enterprise role that grants the View Copilot Metrics permission. The Copilot usage metrics policy must be enabled.

Visit the Copilot usage metrics API documentation to get started.

The post Agentic CLI customizations now in the usage metrics API appeared first on The GitHub Blog.

Source

Originally published at github.blog.

Related Articles

• Making global data easier to explore
• How Cooley is accelerating IPO work with ChatGPT
• Introducing Astra for Law