1275886 - Add telemetry probes to know how much the rulers, measurement and geometry editor tools are being used

Status: NEW

(DevTools :: Inspector, defect, P3)

Description

[Patrick Brosset <:pbro>]

The rulers can be enabled from the settings panel, and then toggled from the toolbar.
Same thing for the measurement tool.
And the geometry editor can be used from the box-model tab.

These 3 tools are most probably not used much, mostly because they are hard to find and enable.
We're considering making changes to that (for instance in bug 1260225), but it would be nice if we had data about their usage.

Data would be kind of hard to interpret right now because the tools are so hard to find that very few people are likely to be using them. But adding probes right now would be nice because then we can track user adoption when we talk about these tools in docs, twitter, conferences, etc...
And when we do move them to a different location, we can hope to see a change in the data collected too.

Comment 1

[Patrick Brosset <:pbro>]

Bryan, do you mind giving some guidance on the type of probes we'd need, or how we'd want to measure usage here?

Comment 2

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

Isn't the rule view already instrumented?  I thought this metric was covering that.
https://telemetry.mozilla.org/new-pipeline/evo.html#!aggregates=median&cumulative=0&end_date=null&keys=&max_channel_version=aurora%252F48&measure=DEVTOOLS_RULEVIEW_OPENED_COUNT&min_channel_version=aurora%252F46&product=Firefox&sanitize=1&sort_keys=submissions&start_date=null&trim=1&use_submission_date=0

I'm not sure measurements for the other tools exist.

The general measurement system we're using for tools is DEVTOOLS_*_OPENED_COUNT which counts the number of times the tool was opened (or turned on) per user session and DEVTOOLS_*_TIME_ACTIVE_SECONDS which records the number of seconds the tool was active per user session. However we aren't actively integrating the time active into our dashboards because it doesn't map well to other measurements within Firefox so we should consider not implementing that if we aren't using it.

The question that really needs to be asked is "What question are you trying to answer with this data?"  Knowing this new location is a better location for the tools might be a decent question however that data likely only needs to be captured for a little while.

Comment 3

[Patrick Brosset <:pbro>]

Inspector bug triage (filter on CLIMBING SHOES).