1457624 - Whitelist relevant telemetry probes for GeckoView

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(GeckoView :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Bug 1452552 will add a `platforms` field to telemetry probes in toolkit/components/telemetry/Histograms.json and Scalars.yaml. By default, probes will NOT be sent.

We will need to review all telemetry probes to decide which should be sent for Fennec and GeckoView users. To whitelist a probe for sending, we need to add `fennec` and/or `geckoview` to the probe's `platforms` list.

Tagging [geckoview:klar:p1] because sending telemetry is a Klar+GeckoView blocker.

Comment 1

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

All probes will be sent by default for Firefox and Fennec, which keeps the current behavior unchanged and there is no work needed for Fennec now.

Comment 2

[Alessio Placitelli [:Dexter]]

(In reply to Chris Peterson [:cpeterson] from comment #1)
> All probes will be sent by default for Firefox and Fennec, which keeps the
> current behavior unchanged and there is no work needed for Fennec now.

Moving this to the GeckoView component, but I'm adding our tagging so that it shows up in our dashboards :)

Comment 3

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

To give context on this, we were not sure if the current payload sizes for outgoing pings will be acceptable from a product perspective.

To have data on this, i ran an analysis on what size these measurements currently have on desktop:
https://gist.github.com/georgf/372b442487e1752081c75314d276203d

The tl;dr is that all scalars & histograms on Firefox Desktop cost us:
- On release, ~25kb for the 95th percentile. Looking at the 99.9th percentile for edge cases, we have ~33kb.
- On nightly, we have ~322kb for the 95th percentile. The 99.9th percentile is ~402kb.

This is not completely representative for what data we would send from GeckoView, but gives us a ballpark idea.

Comment 4

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

To be clear, the above would be a rough estimate of our daily bandwidth impact, before compression.

Comment 5

[David Bolter [:davidb] (NeedInfo me for attention)]

We're okay shipping with what we currently do on Fennec, and this will only really affect pre-release channels (which tend to be power users). I'm making this P3 because it is still worth considering especially if we ever have opt-out scenarios on release.

Comment 6

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

I confirmed with Klar product management that we can proceed with whitelisting all the probes for GeckoView since the big pings only affect pre-release or opt-in users (and the pings should compress well when they are submitted).

Comment 7

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Closing this bug because we don't need to whitelist individual probes for GeckoView because bug 1462389 whitelisted all probes by default.