974136 - Can't select product (Firefox/Fennec) in telemetry dashboard unless "reason" given

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Toolkit :: Telemetry, defect)

Description

[Jason Duell]

Looking at 

  http://telemetry.mozilla.org/

I see that there is no "AppName" field displayed at the top unless I select a "Reason" (of which the only one is currently "saved_session": I'm not sure what that means).

We really need to be able to break down networking telemetry between desktop Firefox and Fennec (and Firefox OS--are those numbers available?).  It seems like the easiest way to get that is to always provide the AppName box (if there's some easier/alternate way, please let me know).

Comment 1

[Mark Reid [:mreid]]

(In reply to Jason Duell (:jduell) from comment #0)
> Looking at 
> 
>   http://telemetry.mozilla.org/
> 
> I see that there is no "AppName" field displayed at the top unless I select
> a "Reason" (of which the only one is currently "saved_session": I'm not sure
> what that means).
"Reason" is basically the part of a session lifecycle that caused the telemetry ping to be submitted. We only want to look at "saved_session" pings in the telemetry dashboard because they represent completed sessions. There are a couple of alternate reasons, including "idle_daily" (which is when partial data for the currently-running session is submitted) and "android_anr_report" (which do not contain Histogram data), but they are not directly comparable to the saved_session data.

Note that the old telemetry dashboard allowed you to look at the "idle_daily" data separately, but that's not yet implemented on the current dashboard.

> We really need to be able to break down networking telemetry between desktop
> Firefox and Fennec (and Firefox OS--are those numbers available?).
Firefox OS numbers are not currently available. Bug 918444 is on file for implementing Telemetry submissions in Firefox OS.

> It seems
> like the easiest way to get that is to always provide the AppName box (if
> there's some easier/alternate way, please let me know).

Can you just select "saved_session" for Reason? Then you can flip back and forth by appName as expected.

Comment 2

[Jason Duell]

> Can you just select "saved_session" for Reason? Then you can flip 
> back and forth by appName as expected.

Now that I know the meaning of this, yes, I can do that.  But it's very unintuitive, so I'd really strongly encourage there being a prominent, understandable way to filter telemetry results by product.  I'd suggest that the top-level toolbar for the UI be

 PRODUCT   RELEASE   TELEMETRY_PROBE_NAME   [TELEMETRY_UPLIFT_TYPE]

where PRODUCT = { Desktop, Android, Firefox OS }
      RELEASE = { nightly 29, etc }
and TELEMETRY_UPLIFT_TYPE is what you're currently calling 'Reason'. (I put it in brackets because I suspect most people won't understand it or need to filter on it in the common case.)

> We only want to look at "saved_session" pings in the telemetry dashboard 
> because they represent completed sessions

For necko at least we don't normally care whether data like "time for HTTP transaction" is from a complete session or a daily upload of a long-lived session.  Also, limiting data to complete sessions excludes power users who keep their browser open for weeks at a time. (Does the telemetry from a week-long session count the same as each 10 minute session from a open-and-exit user?  If so all the more reason to count daily uploads so long-lived sessions' data is reflected more). So it would be great to have the ability to filter telemetry by product while still having reason=*.

Comment 3

[Vladan Djeric (:vladan)]

This was fixed in the new Telemetry dash that Anthony Zhang wrote during his summer 2015 internship