1319102 - Limit event recording to pre-release channels

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Telemetry, defect, P1)

Description

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

The short-term plan for Event Telemetry is to ride on the Fx52+ train, but have it only enabled for pre-release.
This gives us a safety net on budget and bandwidth concerns until we have the next steps discussed.

Comment 1

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

From checking through the options, i remember that we don't have any specific build flag to tell release & beta apart (intentionally, to have proper test coverage of the release state).

However, for Telemetry we have this existing behavior to tweak the default value of the "toolkit.telemetry.enabled" preference:
https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/8387a4ada9a5c4cab059d8fafe0f8c933e83c149/modules/libpref/Preferences.cpp#1354
So, without adding any new hacks, we could hang this off the default value of the Telemetry preference.

If we do that we should give a heads-up to sheriffs@m.o to let them consider the impact (and whether this needs adding a new config for the "beta as release" try pushes).

Comment 2

[Benjamin Smedberg]

For now could you just tie this to extended telemetry being enabled?

Comment 3

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

Estimating this roughly from the saved-session pings on release vs. beta, that will still be a sizable volume of data - probably very roughly a third of the beta volume.

https://metrics.services.mozilla.com/telemetry-budget-dashboard/

Comment 4

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

We talked through this yesterday and decided that we are ok with the volume from release-channel extended Telemetry.

Comment 5

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

Given that, we can just limit probes to opt-in in the Events.yaml file.
No further work needed here, yay.