Closed Bug 1411610 Opened 7 years ago Closed 7 years ago

Telemetry probe for PREFERENCES_OPENED_VIA has extremely high 'spill' count

Categories

(Data Platform and Tools :: General, enhancement)

Product:
Data Platform and Tools
Component:
General
Type:
enhancement
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1403994

People

(Reporter: jaws, Unassigned)

References

Details

I got this alert today in my email,
http://alerts.telemetry.mozilla.org/index.html#/detectors/1/metrics/2346/alerts/?from=2017-06-27&to=2017-06-27

I can't find what 'spill' is, but I assume it means that there is some "spill over" of categories used that don't match the predefined ones?

This is a list of the defined labels: http://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/1285ae3e810e2dbf2652c49ee539e3199fcfe820/toolkit/components/telemetry/Histograms.json#6520

@chutten, is my understanding about 'spill' correct? If so, we need to fix this because it's showing that between 82-93% of the times preferences is opened it is from 'spill'.
Flags: needinfo?(chutten)
"spill" can mean one of two things:

1) In the correct case it counts accumulations that don't match existing categories, as you describe.

2) In the incorrect case, it is a mistake in the aggregator or cerberus (the alert detector) and it reflects the "sum" of the histogram (which for categorical histograms isn't terribly useful)

I'm thinking we're in the land of #2 (ni?frank for his input).

As for the alert, it seems as though it detected a legitimate change in all values that happened in late June (https://mzl.la/2lhosRu). I wonder if it alerted for 20170914's reduction in `aboutHome` values... It's possible that, by including the `spill` bucket, cerberus is missing some alerts because the distribution shape is dominated by the peak at `spill`
Flags: needinfo?(chutten) → needinfo?(fbertsch)
status-firefox58: affected → ---
Component: Preferences → Telemetry Aggregation Service
Product: Firefox → Data Platform and Tools
Version: Trunk → unspecified
Can you confirm that labels were added to the histogram? If so this is a dupe of bug 1403994.
Flags: needinfo?(fbertsch) → needinfo?(jaws)
Depends on: 1374508
Apparently it was, unbeknownst to me.

http://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/diff/1bc251686357d9ef6aad68e3edbf0c372fc838f5/toolkit/components/telemetry/Histograms.json#6454

This was changed by bug 1374508.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 7 years ago
Flags: needinfo?(jaws)
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
Component: Telemetry Aggregation Service → General
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