1657470 - New Metric Type: "Keyed Categorical" (needs a better name)

Status: NEW

(Data Platform and Tools :: Glean Metric Types, enhancement)

Description

[Chris H-C :chutten]

Proposal for changing an existing or adding a new Glean metric type

Who is the individual/team requesting this change?

:chutten, Project FOG

Is this about changing an existing metric type or creating a new one?

Likely creating a new one

Can you describe the data that needs to be recorded?

A variety of data.

• APPLICATION_REPUTATION_SERVER_VERDICT_2
• NETWORK_HTTP_REDIRECT_TO_SCHEME
• HTTP_CHILD_OMT_STATS
• HTTP_CHANNEL_DISPOSITION_UPGRADE
• HTTP_CACHE_DISPOSITION_3
• DNS_TRR_FIRST3
• DNS_TRR_SUCCESS2
• DNS_LOOKUP_DISPOSITION2
• UPTAKE_REMOTE_CONTENT_RESULT_1
• TELEMETRY_SEND_FAILURE_TYPE_PER_PING
• CONTENT_SIGNATURE_VERIFICATION_ERRORS
• PAGE_LOAD_ERROR
• WEBEXT_BROWSERACTION_POPUP_PRELOAD_RESULT_COUNT_BY_ADDONID
• QM_INIT_TELEMETRY_ERROR
• HTTP_TRAFFIC_ANALYSIS_3

Can you provide a raw sample of the data that needs to be recorded (this is in the abstract, and not any particular implementation details about its representation in the payload or the database)

Taking TELEMETRY_SEND_FAILURE_TYPE_PER_PING as an example, I want to record, per ping doctype, the counts of the different failures we experienced trying to send them. (This lets us know if a particular type of ping is more likely to attract a particular type of send failure)

More generically, I want two-step labels for my counts. And ideally I'd like the labels to be able to support more than the BQ-safe subset of Unicode, if possible.

What is the business question/use-case that requires the data to be recorded?

Various

How would the data be consumed?

GLAM, but also possibly in monitoring dashboards and alerting tools.

Why existing metric types are not enough?

Nothing supports this.

What is the timeline by which the data needs to be collected?

Q1 2021

Comment 1

[Paul Zühlcke [:pbz]]

Here is another use case for a "keyed categorical":

We currently use the EXTERNAL_PROTOCOL_HANDLER_DIALOG_CONTEXT_SCHEME probe to record how often we show the protocol handler dialog. We use the keys for the context which navigated to the protocol and the label for the protocol scheme.