{"version":"2.1.239","anchor":"hosted-cloud-sessions-can-spawn-a-separate-vitals-reporting-","canonical_anchor":"hosted-cloud-sessions-can-spawn-a-separate-vitals-reporting-","heading":"Hosted cloud sessions can spawn a separate vitals reporting process, off unless a binary path is pinned","tier":"soon","area":"Cloud Sessions","scope":null,"heads_up":null,"url":"https:\/\/changelogs.core-directive.com\/v\/2.1.239\/e\/hosted-cloud-sessions-can-spawn-a-separate-vitals-reporting-","release_url":"https:\/\/changelogs.core-directive.com\/v\/2.1.239","markdown":"### Hosted cloud sessions can spawn a separate vitals reporting process, off unless a binary path is pinned\n\nHosted cloud sessions can spawn a separate health-reporting helper, which never resolves on a normal install.\n\n**What**\n\nSessions running on Anthropic's hosted cloud workers can launch an external helper called `vitals-emitter-guest` as a child process that reports session health back to the service. It only starts when there is an SDK URL, a remote session id and a readable session token file, so anyone running the CLI locally never sees it. The cloud session launcher builds the emitter in pinned mode, and in that mode the path resolver will not search PATH, so on a normal install nothing resolves and nothing spawns.\n\n**Details**\n\n- The child is invoked with `--session-id`, `--api-url` and `--token-file`.\n- The binary path comes from the `VITALS_EMITTER_BIN` environment variable, which must be absolute, otherwise a PATH lookup, otherwise a fallback of `\/root\/.local\/bin\/vitals-emitter-guest`; pinned mode skips the PATH lookup entirely, so with no absolute `VITALS_EMITTER_BIN` the emitter resolves to nothing and stays off.\n- Setting `CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_VITALS_EMITTER` turns it off, and essential-traffic-only mode bails out of it too.\n- The child runs with a scrubbed environment holding only PATH, HOME, TMPDIR, the proxy variables and SSL_CERT_FILE.\n- The process is supervised: respawned with backoff, stopped with SIGTERM then SIGKILL, and its stderr is piped into the log.\n- Telemetry under the name `ccr_vitals_emitter` records success, spawn_failed and exited_unexpectedly.\n- None of this machinery is present in 2.1.238.\n\n**Evidence**\n\n`[vitals] kill switch or essential-traffic-only set; guest vitals disabled`, `[vitals] VITALS_EMITTER_BIN not set; guest vitals disabled (this launcher does not search PATH)`\n\n- Area: Cloud Sessions\n- Names: `--token-file`, `CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_VITALS_EMITTER`\n- Tier: Nothing to try yet\n- Useful: 1\/5\n- Signal: 3\/5\n- Present in the build but not switched on"}