1225540 - FX_URLBAR_SELECTED_RESULT_TYPE and FX_URLBAR_SELECTED_RESULT_INDEX are expired already

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P1)

Description

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

These 2 probes can give us very useful information about urlbar usage that is one of the main interaction endpoints. But they were given a too small time window.
I think these probes should just never expire so we can check them when we make changes to the urlbar interaction. Or if that's not possible, we should bump them enough for us to complete most changes.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

Attachment: patch v1

I think the result type probe is something that will be generally always useful to check the awesomebar usage.
The index probe is a little less useful, but since we are touching the awesomebar right in these versions is worth bumping it up still for some versions.

Comment 2

[Vladan Djeric (:vladan)]

Comment on attachment 8694243 [details] [diff] [review]
patch v1

Review of attachment 8694243 [details] [diff] [review]:
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The renewals are fine. Can you add the alert_emails & bug_numbers fields to these histograms while you're at it, and update the descriptions to point to docs for the meaning of the enum codes (or document inline).

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

(In reply to Vladan Djeric (:vladan) -- please needinfo! from comment #2)
> Can you add the alert_emails

Are alerts mandatory? we look at these histograms after urlbar changes, but they are not made to send "alerts".
I'm also not sure what they would alert on enumerated histograms... a change in the distribution?

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance/Adding_a_new_Telemetry_probe
states alert_emails is optional

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

Attachment: patch v1.1 (no alerts)

Comment 6

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

I guess for now I will land without the alert_emails property, and then if it ends up being mandatory I can just land a follow-up patch and fix mdn.

Comment 7

[Pulsebot]

https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/fx-team/rev/c9c2015c63c5

Comment 8

[Vladan Djeric (:vladan)]

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [::mak] from comment #3)
> Are alerts mandatory? we look at these histograms after urlbar changes, but
> they are not made to send "alerts".
> I'm also not sure what they would alert on enumerated histograms... a change
> in the distribution?

The alerts fire when there is a very significant change in the distribution of the data in the histogram. There are defenses against noise in the monitoring code, so the false positive rate is extremely low. The alert_emails field also helps us identify owners.

You can see examples of past alerts here https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mozilla.dev.telemetry-alerts

We don't want to miss big changes in the Telemetry data, and realistically most probe authors don't actively monitor their probes. We certainly don't want to end up with probes that collect data about users and never expire, but are not monitored. 

So I'd like to have the alert_emails fields for these histograms as well. Alternately, we can report the changes via Bugzilla, and you could just tell us which well-monitored component to file the bugs in (put the component name in the the hgram's description field).

Comment 9

[Pulsebot]

https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/fx-team/rev/22d7d0b39c38

Comment 10

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/c9c2015c63c5
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/22d7d0b39c38