1879667 - Need a way to record experiment information in the serp category ping

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Search, task, P3)

Description

[Wil Stuckey]

We will want a method for including specific experiment information in the SERP category ping. Because the ohttp pings will not include ping_info metadata, which currently contains all experiments a client is enrolled in, we need some way to record that the client is enrolled in a specific experiment & branch.

A possible (maybe) path would be a boolean nimbus variable that turned on experiment logging for the experiment that sets the value.

Comment 1

[Chris Bellini (:cbellini)]

We'll need a bit more investigation around ensuring we can get the experiment stub and branch names.

Also might be worth a Privacy review to ensure that this isn't a fingerprinting vector.

Comment 2

[Wil Stuckey]

Any update on this?

Comment 3

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

For the record, there are Glean APIs for setting (but not getting) the experiments block, and their are Nimbus APIs for getting. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1868676 for example usage, namely https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/1f5e1875cbfd5d4b1bfa27ca54832f62dd19589e/toolkit/components/nimbus/lib/ExperimentStore.sys.mjs#293.

Comment 4

[Stephanie Cunnane [:scunnane]]

Very helpful - thanks for the clarification, Nick.

Comment 5

[Stephanie Cunnane [:scunnane]]

Attachment: Bug 1879667 - Record client's experiment information in the SERP categorization ping. r?jteow!

Comment 6

[Stephanie Cunnane [:scunnane]]

Wil, for this patch I'm now planning to allow the single experiment to be specified via the Nimbus config, within the recipe JSON in the Experimenter UI. So for a given feature object, you'd ensure that the following key-value pairs appear:

"featureId": "search",
"value": {
   "targetExperiment": "dummy-experiment"
}

Then the following info would come back as a new Glean object metric added to the custom SERP categorization ping:

{ 
  slug: "dummy-experiment",
  isActive: true,
  branch: "control"
}

Is this what you have in mind?

Comment 7

[Wil Stuckey]

looks great, thank you

Comment 8

[Stephanie Cunnane [:scunnane]]

Attachment: Bug 1879667 - Record client's experiment information in the SERP categorization ping. r?jteow!