1285264 - Why are the submissions from the "Other" channel increasing?

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Cloud Services Graveyard :: Metrics: Pipeline, defect, P1)

Description

[Mark Reid [:mreid]]

We noticed that the submissions from "Other" channels (in this case, ones that are not "release", "beta", "aurora", or "nightly") are on the rise. Corroborated at both [1] and [2].

My theory is that it could be due to Unified Telemetry landing in the Extended Support Release (esr) channel.

In order to check that, we should filter by normalized channel == 'Other', then group the submissions by the actual channel name in the payload (for main pings, this would be found in the `application.channel` part of the payload[3].

[1] https://sql.telemetry.mozilla.org/queries/81/source#127
[2] https://metrics.services.mozilla.com/telemetry-budget-dashboard/
[3] https://gecko.readthedocs.io/en/latest/toolkit/components/telemetry/telemetry/common-ping.html

Comment 1

[Mark Reid [:mreid]]

Attachment: List of Channels for 20161019 by ping count and size

I had a notebook with easy access to this data already, so adding it for posterity.

Comment 2

[Ryan Harter [:harter]]

Since this has sat for a while, I want to confirm we're talking about the increase in Other Pings that appears to start on 2016-06-10 [0]. It looks like peak Other Pings appear to roughly double in a week. This event is now out of range on the budget dashboard [1]

We can verify this question with STMO [4]. It looks like the increase in Other Pings is clearly from increasing ESR pings[2].

As always, a plot is worth a thousand words:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/harterrt/other_pings_investigation/master/other_pings_investigation.png


[0]https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bxe938oq1vUJV1Zpbzlad0NFX0E
[1]https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bxe938oq1vUJTlUwZFNKeWpqUEU

[2] Plot showing ESR increase: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/harterrt/other_pings_investigation/master/other_pings_investigation.png
[3] Supporting R code: https://github.com/harterrt/other_pings_investigation/blob/master/main.R
[4] Supporting STMO query: https://sql.telemetry.mozilla.org/queries/1549/source#table