View source for User:Mconnor/Current/FHR-Data-Summary

= Overview =

The Firefox Health Report creates a daily data report to Mozilla of consisting carefully-selected data judged critical to gaining a greater understanding of our users.

Our goal is to provide real user value by allowing a user to compare their data against the aggregate data collected by the service, to highlight performance issues or common problems for a given configuration.

= Technical Description of Data Submitted =

For an exhaustive list of data submitted by the report, please see the [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AtdL1GrYQUbldFBBUUNkbTBKNjZTd3dTeTZ0QUhaNXc#gid=0 current list]

= Summary of Key Data Points =

The data submitted by the Firefox Health Report consists of a number of key components:

== Configuration Data ==

FHR reports a comprehensive set of data about the current build and active platform, specifically:

* Full build information (version, target OS, build ID, distribution and update channels)
* Current environment (current locale, OS information, CPU (cores and architecture) and RAM (megabytes)
* Profile age and current session length. 

This data is probably only directly useful for class-of-hardware/memory count messaging.  However, it can be used to filter aggregate data to provide more relevant comparisons elsewhere

== Version Data ==

This section provides data on previously-used versions, and is probably not high-value to a user-facing report, aside from perhaps detecting "this user lags updates" and recommending auto-updates.

== Add-ons Data ==

This section provides information on all extensions and plugins, excluding those where the developer has requested that data not be provided.  The key data that is most useful includes:

* Currently installed add-ons + enabled state (enabled/user-disabled/blocked/incompatible)
* Install/update dates, and third-party installed flag

The most obvious case is to warn users about problematic add-ons, and possibly highlighting recently installed add-ons.

== Per-Day Metrics ==

FHR collects a number of per-day stats to create a comprehensive profile of usage over time.  As we only retain the current report, each report contains up to 180 days' worth of this data.

Key Data:

* Searches by UI component.  This data includes engine names where Mozilla has a search partnership agreement, otherwise it is part of "Other"
* Session lengths, active times, and shutdown stats (clean shutdown or otherwise)
* Add-on counts by category (Theme, lightweight theme (Personas), plugins, extensions)
* Startup performance (multiple measurement points)
* Places info (total bookmarks + total history items)

As we can process data over time, we can detect aberrations in performance by date, and cross-check against both app version and add-on install/update dates (with some fuzz) to suggest possible causes.  (i.e. startup performance degrades by 40% when Bob's Awesome Add-on gets installed? suggest disabling and checking perf!)