491561 - Allow showing usage statistics for add-on/application versions relative to total usage

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Statistics, enhancement, P4)

Description

[Wladimir Palant]

Attachment: Example: Adblock Plus usage by version relative to total usage

ADU numbers for add-ons vary a lot, especially now that all weekdays are sampled. This makes it hard to investigate upgrade trends however. For example, I wanted to see what percentage of my users already upgraded to Adblock Plus 1.0.2 and what the trend there is - but getting that information from the statistics dashboard is pretty hard. I ended up using gnuplot to process the data myself. The resulting graph is attached.

It is similarly problematic to understand, what percentage of your users already upgraded to latest Firefox version and how long it will take until that number reaches 80%. Again, the graph was trivial to interpret once I made gnuplot show normalized numbers.

Comment 1

[Wladimir Palant]

Note that bug 425736 is similar but it is about normalizing the total ADU number.

Comment 2

[Daniel Einspanjer [:dre] [:deinspanjer]]

So I got from bug 425736 that having the Firefox ADU would allow us to have a percentage that would be valuable to the AMO community.

How exactly did you "normalize" the numbers?  Did you just take a weekly average?

I'd like to iron out what additional data points would be most useful to you.

Comment 3

[Wladimir Palant]

In the graph attached I simply divided ADU numbers per version by total ADU numbers for Adblock Plus - and all the sudden I got easily readable trends. That's data which is already available, so it's just a matter of visualizing it.

Bug 425736 is about the ability to divide extension's total ADU by Firefox ADU - I guess that this will show more obvious trends as well (in the current graphs extension's own trends are almost not recognizable behind Firefox usage patterns).

Comment 4

[Wladimir Palant]

Note that it doesn't have to be Firefox (though Firefox is probably responsible for more than 90% of the pings) - if AMO has a way to get the total number of users who contacted it on a day that would be even better (that's different from the total number of pings because users with multiple extensions send multiple pings).

Comment 5

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

Fligtar is dreaming up some fixes for the stats pages and mccammos always has numbers on the brain, so I'm CCing them.

Comment 6

[Potch [:potch]]

This is a pretty excellent idea- I'm going to look into whether this is feasible in the new stats UI.

Comment 8

[Wladimir Palant]

And that idea is actually so old that I ended up filing a duplicate of it myself.

Comment 9

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

Thanks for filing this.  In an effort to not drown in existing reports we're aggressively closing old enhancements and bugs to get the buglist to a reasonable level so we can scope and process bug sprints in an effective manner.

Patches for this bug are still welcome.