1597256 - Add "silent" indicator to full installer telemetry

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Installer, enhancement, P1)

Description

[Romain Testard [:RT]]

Full installer telemetry shows full installer installs in volumes that don't align with download data. It is likely related to enterprise behaviors where an enterprise either deploys new Firefox installations centrally or updates existing Firefox installations centrally by installing Firefox through the full installer silently.
It would be valuable to quantify full installer installs made silently to better understand significance of this use case to help make sense of telemetry and prioritize related use cases.

Comment 1

[Molly Howell (she/her) (no longer active)]

We have from_msi already, but there's no reason not to add a silent flag also.

What's the priority for this? The installer patch would be easy, but adding things to the telemetry schema is always a bit of a pain.

Comment 2

[Romain Testard [:RT]]

Would the installer patch break the current telemetry?
If we don't risk breaking the current telemetry then I'd say let's do it and we can at least start collecting data that can then be viewed once the telemetry pipeline is ready to digest it? Blake do you have thoughts there?

Comment 3

[Blake Imsland [:robotblake]]

Would this data be sent to download-stats? If so a new field would probably require a version bump in the ingestion pipeline for this stuff.

Comment 4

[Molly Howell (she/her) (no longer active)]

No, this is for the full installer ping, which uses this schema.

Comment 5

[Blake Imsland [:robotblake]]

I'm going to rope in :relud as I believe he's the one that set up the installer ingestion bits in GCP.

Comment 6

[Daniel Thorn [:relud]]

Would this data be sent to download-stats? If so a new field would probably require a version bump in the ingestion pipeline for this stuff.

No, this is for the full installer ping, which uses this schema.

adding a field to download-stats would require a version bump, but isn't necessary for adding fields to full installer pings

Would the installer patch break the current telemetry?

there should be no problem with adding another field to full installer pings, so long as we add it to the schema before we start sending it.

Comment 7

[Romain Testard [:RT]]

Thanks - so if I get this right we're OK to add a new "silent" field to full installer pings without breaking our current telemetry analysis.
I assume a new bug will then have to be opened with Data platform in order to get the download-stats schema updated.

Comment 8

[Molly Howell (she/her) (no longer active)]

Gonna go ahead and start on this. To answer comment 7, the schemas are kept on GitHub, so I'll file an issue there and submit a PR to change the schema.

Comment 9

[Molly Howell (she/her) (no longer active)]

https://github.com/mozilla-services/mozilla-pipeline-schemas/pull/453

Comment 10

[Molly Howell (she/her) (no longer active)]

Attachment: Bug 1597256 - Add 'silent' to the full installer ping. r=agashlin

Comment 11

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/775c7e908f90
Add 'silent' to the full installer ping. r=agashlin

Comment 12

[Alexandru Michis [:malexandru]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/775c7e908f90