1577653 - Collect interactions from Firefox's VSCode extension

Status: NEW

(Data Platform and Tools :: General, task, P3)

Description

[:Harald Kirschner :digitarald]

To understand adoption of Firefox's VSCode extension we need to instrument basic usage (attempted/successful connections & pausing, general Category 2 “Interaction data”) of the extension's functionality. We need this data to answer our 2 main questions:

a) if investment in the extension is actually leading to more installs and usage
b) if users don't just install the extension, but also successfully set it up and use it

VSCode Marketplace does not provide any statistics beyond snapshots of download and installs.

Comment 1

[:Harald Kirschner :digitarald]

amiyaguchi mentioned that there is a new ingestion endpoint with a schema database that should be able to handle this without much effort.

Tim recommended to reach out to Frank about this, can you point me in the right direction and next steps?

Comment 2

[:Harald Kirschner :digitarald]

Related, this npm package is used to collect data via Application Insights: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-extension-telemetry/blob/master/src/telemetryReporter.ts

Comment 3

[Frank Bertsch [:frank]]

:harald, our new ingestion endpoint is (from the viewpoint of a user) not much different than our old one. We can accept gzipped JSON payloads of any type, with a corresponding JSON schema put in www.github.com/mozilla-services/mozilla-pipeline-schemas. Would that suffice for your needs? Does your team have the bandwidth to create a JSON payload and POST it to the telemetry servers?

Comment 4

[:Harald Kirschner :digitarald]

Does your team have the bandwidth to create a JSON payload and POST it to the telemetry servers?

We can handle the integration with the extension, yes.

Does this work also include the setup of designing a JSON schema and providing a pull request to mozilla-pipeline-schemas, or is that something from the data platform team can help with?

Comment 5

[hbenl]

Could this be done using the existing Firefox telemetry? The debug adapter could send "telemetry events" to Firefox via RDP and Firefox would include them in the telemetry data that it sends to Mozilla. This way you could correlate the debug adapter's data with the data you get from Firefox. Just a thought.

Comment 6

[:Harald Kirschner :digitarald]

The debug adapter could send "telemetry events"

That would be hard to validate, as clients could send any data to telemetry via the server. It is easier then the instrumented code collects and sends the data. Since we have the endpoint, the collection is technically solved but we need more planning and sign offs for data collection.

Comment 7

[Mark Reid [:mreid]]

(In reply to :Harald Kirschner :digitarald from comment #4)

Does your team have the bandwidth to create a JSON payload and POST it to the telemetry servers?

We can handle the integration with the extension, yes.

Does this work also include the setup of designing a JSON schema and providing a pull request to mozilla-pipeline-schemas, or is that something from the data platform team can help with?

We can review and provide feedback on the schema design. If you have a sample document, it should be fairly easy to define a JSONSchema for it.

Comment 8

[Mark Reid [:mreid]]

Harald, can I help nove this work forward?

Comment 9

[:Harald Kirschner :digitarald]

Yes, it would be great to jump on a call to collect some more technical details to document requirements for the clientside implementation.

Comment 10

[Mark Reid [:mreid]]

The requirements for sending new data are documented here. I'd be happy to have a call to go through anything not covered there, feel free to drop an invite on my calendar.