Event Telemetry

The Telemetry wiki page has more information about using Telemetry -- this page describes the Event Telemetry project.

Overview

There is a common need across teams (fx-team, mobile, test-pilot, heartbeat, …) to have a mechanism for recording, storing, sending & analysing application usage in an event-oriented format. The Data Platform team wants to support this with a common API and mechanisms for dealing with the collected data, without owning the individual measurements. The solution here is to provide common client code, a standard data format, so we can come up with common processes and tooling for data pipeline & analysis work. Historically we already send a form of UITelemetry data, but the current format is too complicated to work with and to maintain.

Dates

• ...: Event data explorable in re:dash (from pre-release channels)
• Fx52 (~2017-03-07): Event data collection implemented in Firefox Telemetry

Goals for Event Telemetry

• Enable exploratory usage behavior analysis
• Enable event data collection from Firefox and addons

Documentation

• Event Telemetry draft
• In-tree docs (to be written)

Analysis and Reporting

• Raw data using a spark cluster (ATMO): https://analysis.telemetry.mozilla.org/
• re:dash event data tables (STMO): https://sql.telemetry.mozilla.org/

Project

Deliverables

• Establish a common event data format and tooling.
• Record event data with at least (object, method, timestamp) data.
• Enable categorizing of events, so we can serve different pings with the same API and data format.
• Allow distinguishing between opt-in and opt-out event recording.
• Allow easy recording & submission of events in batches.
• Events submitted with the main ping should have occurred in that pings subsession.
• Flat data format, not nested.
• Enforce client-side limits on event data to avoid spamming.
• Shipping new event recording without riding the trains.
• Validation of the data based on schemas.
• Enforcement of data review, quality control, documentation.

Client work

• client bug tree
• current sprint

Client Testing

• Test cases document
• Spreadsheet to track testing
• Bugzilla tracking

Event Implementation Plan

• List of Event groups, events, owners etc

Communication

• Conversation about Event telemetry on fhr-dev: https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/fhr-dev
• IRC: #telemetry
• Slack: #fx-metrics
• Weekly Meeting notes
• EPM reports

Resources / Notes

• Event Telemetry Data sets discussion

People and Roles

• Georg Fritzsche (Data Platform, lead)
• Alessio Placitelli, :Dexter (Data Platform)
• Mark Reid (Data Platform)
• Roberto Vitillo (Data Platform)
• Sunah Suh (Data Platform)
• Rebecca Weiss (PM)
• Ilana Segall (Analysis)
• John Dorlus (Quality Engineering)
• Thomas Huelbert (project management)