1224336 - Search counts recorded in Fennec FHR with "null" search engine

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Health Report Graveyard :: Client: Android, defect)

Description

[Dave Zeber [:dzeber]]

On a recent query of search counts on Fennec (searches during October 2015) I found a noticeable proportion of counts with the search engine recorded as "null". 

It is appearing in the top 10 most frequently used search engines on an overall daily basis. This is worrying because these searches are more common that most of our partner search engines, making me think something is not getting recorded correctly. Also, these "null" searches take up a much larger proportion of searches on certain partner builds.

An example of one of these search counts looks like this:

"org.mozilla.searches.counts":{"_v":"6","bartext":{"null":1}}}

Comment 1

[Dave Zeber [:dzeber]]

The percentage of searches recorded with the search engine "null", by distribution, over the month of October, is available at https://metrics.mozilla.com/protected/dzeber/tmp/fennec-null-search-engine-by-distrib.csv (behind LDAP). The stock distribution is recorded as "".

It looks like this problem is mostly affecting partner distributions. On most partner builds, the percent of searches using the "null" engine is in the double digits.

Comment 2

[Sheeri Cabral [:sheeri]]

Is this something the Data Team should look into? When you're searching, are you searching somewhere in hadoop (if so, where) or on a Vertica table? We can check our processing...

Comment 3

[Dave Zeber [:dzeber]]

(In reply to Sheeri Cabral [:sheeri] from comment #2)
> Is this something the Data Team should look into? When you're searching, are
> you searching somewhere in hadoop (if so, where) or on a Vertica table? We
> can check our processing...

As we discussed offline, this is showing up in the raw JSON FHR payloads, so I suspect it's much more likely to be something client-side. 

I'm running against the Fennec deorphaned snapshots.

Comment 4

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

What is is the timeline for moving from FHR to telemetry on Android?

Is this worth investigating?

Comment 5

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

FHR was removed from Android with bug 1183320. We should investigate the situation in Telemetry instead.

Unless there is value in explaining the historical situation here, let's close this bug.

Comment 6

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Agreed. (In reply to Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche] from comment #5)
> FHR was removed from Android with bug 1183320. We should investigate the
> situation in Telemetry instead.

Agreed.