Telemetry

Telemetry

It's helpful for Mozilla's engineers and decision-makers to be able to measure how Firefox behaves in the real world. The Telemetry feature provides this capability by sending performance and usage info to Mozilla. As you use Firefox, Telemetry measures and collects non-personal information, such as performance, hardware, usage and customizations. It then sends this information to Mozilla on a daily basis and we use it to improve Firefox.

Seeing the Collected Data

• Instance Telemetry data (collected in your browser) can be viewed by typing about:telemetry into the Firefox URL bar.
• Aggregate Telemetry data from all submissions can be viewed on the Telemetry dashboard at telemetry.mozilla.org.
• Arbitrary custom analyses can be done via analysis.telemetry.mozilla.org.
• Different datasets are available for SQL queries in our re:dash instance.

Documentation

For Firefox Devs

Telemetry client-side:

• MDN: Adding a new Telemetry probe
  • Data collection policy
• Telemetry ping format (in-tree documentation)
  • Older ping formats
• Adding a new Telemetry ping type
  • Known Telemetry ping types: Telemetry/PingTypes
• Telemetry Experiments

Telemetry back-end:

• Data Pipeline Documentation : CloudServices/DataPipeline
• Known Telemetry ping types: Telemetry/PingTypes

Analyzing Telemetry:

• Choosing a Dataset
• Writing custom analysis jobs:
  • Writing custom analysis jobs with Spark
  • Custom dashboards with re:dash
  • Working with the longitudinal dataset
  • Telemetry Quirks: things to watch out for when analyzing Telemetry data

Telemetry status:

• Telemetry Errata: outages & known issues with collected Telemetry data
• Telemetry Twitter account
• Heka dashboard showing Telemetry health, in particular the page showing submission rates & sizes

For Firefox Users

• Mozilla Support: Send performance data to Mozilla to help improve Firefox
• Mozilla Support: How can I help by submitting mobile performance data?
• Telemetry and User Control: FAQ

Filing Bugs

Telemetry client (in product) bugs should be filed in Toolkit::Telemetry.

Telemetry dashboard bugs should be filed in Webtools::Telemetry Dashboard

Telemetry data related bugs should be filed in Webtools::Telemetry Server

Tracking Bugs

Open Telemetry bugs are usually organized as a blocker for one of the following tracking bugs:

• Desired Telemetry measurements / probes
• Telemetry data quality issues
• Tracking for desired Telemetry dashboards
• Telemetry cleanup work
• Telemetry ping size issues
• Tracking about:telemetry work and improvements

Communication

Communication Type	Mechanism	Audience
Asking questions	#telemetry on irc.mozilla.org	devs
General discussion	dev-platform and fhr-dev list	devs
Announcements	dev-platform, dev-planning lists	all

People

Project Champion
Program Management
Product	Benjamin Smedberg, Vladan Djeric
UX
Client Engineering	Vladan Djeric, Georg Fritzsche, Alessio Placitelli
Server Engineering	Mark Reid
Data Analysis	Roberto Vitillo
Privacy	Sid Stamm
Legal	Jishnu Menon

Reference

Out of date:

• Performance/Telemetry page
• Probe implementation
• Telemetry Privacy Review
• Telemetry Experiments QA