1653028 - Review our Telemetry usage for add-ons

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, task, P3)

Description

[William Durand [:willdurand] [OOO until Aug. 25]]

We have add-ons-related Telemetry data in various locations (based on about:telemetry > "raw json"):

1. payload.info.addons: a unique (and potentially long) string containing the list of enabled add-ons (GUIDs and versions, all add-on types)
2. environment.addons.activeAddons: only enabled web-extensions are listed there, along with a lot of data like version, updateDay, description, name, installDay, signedState, etc.
3. environment.addons.theme: data for the currently enabled theme
4. payload.addonDetails.XPI: this isn't always available it seems (only Nightly?). It contains data about most add-ons (not just web-extensions) but very few properties (name, creator and sometimes location)

It would be nice to, at least, understand (1) why we need similar data in different locations, (2) if each location is still being used and/or needed, and (3) if we could make some changes to deduplicate some of the data. We could also document the different use cases.

Comment 1

[William Durand [:willdurand] [OOO until Aug. 25]]

Those bugs mention one of the locations above: Bug 1201837 and Bug 1485703, and both are about removing data.

Comment 2

[Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie]

Will, are you interested in adding a test for this existing data as a short-term guarantee nobody removes it without us noticing? If you are, feel free to ask us for help.

Comment 3

[William Durand [:willdurand] [OOO until Aug. 25]]

(In reply to Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie from comment #2)

Will, are you interested in adding a test for this existing data as a short-term guarantee nobody removes it without us noticing? If you are, feel free to ask us for help.

Good idea, I filed Bug 1653348 for this.

Comment 4

[William Durand [:willdurand] [OOO until Aug. 25]]

This has been largely done by Luca and me this week. We identified some probes that are no longer needed and we'll remove them, the rest is documented in this gdoc.