Copilot metrics missed agent activity, and the gap cannot be backfilled

Any team reading GitHub Copilot's usage metrics dashboard and seeing agent activity drop while overall Copilot use kept going up has been reading an incomplete number. GitHub said in a changelog post that it has found the cause and started rolling out a fix, one IDE at a time, and that the missing data cannot be recovered after the fact.

The cause, GitHub says, is a recent move of agent sessions to the Copilot SDK inside each IDE. Those sessions did not include a field that said which IDE they came from, so the usage metrics system could not attribute them. Most of that activity was left out of reports altogether, and some was mis-counted as Copilot CLI activity.

Which IDE versions carry the fix

The fix is available now in Visual Studio Code 1.139.0 and later. GitHub says Visual Studio 18.12 is expected in October 2026, and the next plugin release for JetBrains IDEs is expected by late October 2026. Eclipse and Xcode plugins are both expected by November 2026. Earlier IDE versions that do not use the Copilot SDK for agent mode are not affected and already report correctly.

Who is seeing the gap

Billing was not affected by the mis-attribution. The problem only changed how agent activity showed up in the usage metrics dashboard and API, not what customers were charged. GitHub says agent interactions and the loc_added_sum and loc_deleted_sum fields for agent_edit stayed undercounted for any developer still on an affected IDE version. The gap applies to enterprise, organisation and user reports, in both the 1-day and 28-day windows.

GitHub says it cannot backfill the missing data, because the affected activity does not carry an IDE identifier, so it cannot be attributed after the fact. Recovery will come as developers update, which GitHub says will show up gradually in the numbers rather than as one step up on the day the fix is available.

Copilot CLI metrics may now read high for the same reason the IDE metrics read low: some activity from other SDK-based clients was counted as Copilot CLI use. GitHub says that will clear up as those clients update, but it will not go back and separate the earlier numbers. Copilot CLI users themselves do not need to update.

A team centrally managing IDE versions can plan a direct move to the fixed versions once each one ships. GitHub also recommends keeping IDE telemetry on and allowing the Copilot telemetry endpoint through proxies and firewalls, because the detailed breakdowns the dashboard shows, such as lines of code and accepted suggestions, come from the editor itself. The per-user report's totals_by_ide block now carries last_known_ide_version and last_known_plugin_version for each user, which is what a reader uses to spot developers who are still on an affected build.

For a manager who argues for Copilot right now, the practical result is that the numbers used to argue for it have been low, and the only way to make the dashboard match actual use is to move everyone onto the right IDE build before the gap in that user's history grows.

Source

Primary source: Update your IDE to restore agent activity in Copilot usage metrics on The GitHub Blog.