1888071 - Add an annotation to flag crashes submitteed by the new crash reporter client

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Crash Reporting, task)

Description

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

To more easily identify the crashes submitted via the new crash reporter client we should add an annotation to flag them. Something like NewCrashReporterClient. Alternatively we could reuse the SubmittedFrom annotation by adding a new field to it (like NewClient or RustClient).

Comment 1

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

These are the values I'm aware of so far for SubmittedFrom:

• Auto: the user had opted-in to auto-submission
• Infobar: the user clicked on the infobar to submit the crash
• AboutCrashes: the user sent the crash from the about:crashes page
• CrashedTab: the user sent the crash from a crashed tab page
• Client: the user sent the crash using the crash reporter client

https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/documentation/datadictionary/dataset/annotation/field/SubmittedFrom

If the new crash reporter client can only be used for the Client case and none of the others, then we could add RustClient to the list and use that.

Comment 2

[Alex Franchuk [:afranchuk]]

Is it worth doing something like adding ClientVersion as an annotation, so that we can bump the version on future changes and have that information available already (for when we may want to see reports resulting from those changes)?

Comment 3

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

We've got multiple clients, so the ClientVersion annotation would need to include the name of the client and the version. I think that'd be more helpful especially if we can get all of the clients to do that.

Do we know offhand if this information is already in the User-Agent field of the HTTP POST request? If not, it should be. That allows us to look at logs for crash reports that are malformed, get rejected, and other scenarios where Socorro never collects and processes the crash report.

Comment 4

[Alex Franchuk [:afranchuk]]

I thought it'd be used in conjunction with SubmittedFrom (unless there's clients more granular than that?).

YES! The User-Agent is set to crashreporter/1.0.0 right now, and it is programmed such that it will be the package version whenever it's changed.

Comment 5

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

Is it the case that each SubmittedFrom value is a distinct crash reporter client? I thought that it was for how the user interacted with the product to submit the crash report. I don't want to overload that annotation such that we end up in a place where, for example, the user submitted the crash from the infobar with possible multiple crash reporter variations.

Thinking about all the bits here more, I think we should either:

1. create a new annotation,
2. or we settle on making sure the User-Agent is set correctly for all crash submissions from Firefox and adjust the collector to capture that in the raw crash structure
3. or both create a new annotation and make sure we're using the User-Agent and they're set the same

Comment 6

[Alex Franchuk [:afranchuk]]

Hmm, yeah I guess each SubmittedFrom value doesn't necessarily map to a distinct client since e.g. Auto could be any client right now. Though FWIW, I think it might be better if SubmittedFrom did uniquely map to a particular client since then it would more-or-less identify the exact code path the crash went through.

I think using the User-Agent is appropriate, however I'd want that information exposed in crash-stats. I'm not opposed to also adding an annotation if others feel that would be useful too. Notably, adding an annotation more closely ties the data together, though we could also have the server add the annotation based on the User-Agent so that if you download a crash the information is there.

Comment 7

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

User-Agent is a good idea, especially given we already have it. crashreporter/1.0.0 is the user agent of the new crash reporter client, the old one used either Breakpad/1.0 (Windows) or Breakpad/1.0 (Linux). It doesn't seem like we set a user agent explicitly on macOS, so it might be missing entirely there. In all cases, both old and new, the SubmittedFrom annotation is set to Client.

Comment 8

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

I misunderstood the last comment. We can use that to know which crash reports are which. We'll add support for capturing the user-agent in bug #1888201. Closing this as WONTFIX.