Telemetry

Telemetry

It's helpful for Mozilla's engineers and decision-makers to be able to measure how Firefox behaves in the real world. The Telemetry feature provides this capability by sending performance and usage info to Mozilla. As you use Firefox, Telemetry measures and collects non-personal information, such as performance, hardware, usage and customizations. It then sends this information to Mozilla on a daily basis and we use it to improve Firefox.

Seeing the Collected Data

Instance Telemetry data (collected in your browser) can be viewed by typing about:telemetry into the Firefox URL bar.

• Aggregate Telemetry data from all submissions can be viewed on the Telemetry dashboard at telemetry.mozilla.org.
• Arbitrary custom analyses can be done via analysis.telemetry.mozilla.org.
• Different datasets are available for SQL queries in our re:dash instance.

Documentation

For Firefox Devs

Telemetry client-side:

• MDN: Adding a new Telemetry probe
  • Data collection policy
• Telemetry ping format (in-tree documentation)
  • Older ping formats
• Custom payloads uploaded by Telemetry:
  • Loop (aka Firefox Hello) "ICE Failures" payload (with payload.reason="loop")
  • ...there are others
• Adding a new Telemetry ping type
• Telemetry Experiments

Telemetry server-side:

• Telemetry back-end design: CloudServices/DataPipeline#Pipeline_specs.2Fdocs
• Known Telemetry ping types: Telemetry/PingTypes

Analyzing Telemetry:

• Available Datasets and their Applications
• List of Telemetry tools (dashboards, custom analyses, and others)
• Telemetry analysis & dashboarding overview
• Writing custom analysis jobs:
  • Launch an ad-hoc analysis cluster
  • Scheduling a custom analysis job
  • Telemetry Quirks: things to watch out for when analysing Telemetry data
  • Telemetry Server-side development documentation
• Working with the longitudinal dataset:
  • Tutorial notebook
  • Examples

Telemetry status:

• Telemetry Errata: outages & known issues with collected Telemetry data
• Telemetry Twitter account
• Heka dashboard showing Telemetry health, in particular the page showing submission rates & sizes

New "unified" Telemetry that replaces FHR:

• Unified Telemetry overview #1
• Overview #2
  • Unification progress: tracking bug

Code:

• Telemetry code in desktop Firefox
• Telemetry dashboard code
• AWS Telemetry backend code - soon to be superceded by the next generation backend
  • Telemetry backend code for aggregating histograms

For Firefox Users

• Mozilla Support: Send performance data to Mozilla to help improve Firefox
• Mozilla Support: How can I help by submitting mobile performance data?
• Telemetry and User Control: FAQ

Filing Bugs

Telemetry client (in product) bugs should be filed in Toolkit::Telemetry.

Telemetry dashboard bugs should be filed in Webtools::Telemetry Dashboard

Telemetry data related bugs should be filed in Webtools::Telemetry Server

Tracking Bugs

Open Telemetry bugs are usually organized as a blocker for one of the following tracking bugs:

• Desired Telemetry measurements / probes
• Telemetry data quality issues
• Tracking for desired Telemetry dashboards
• Telemetry cleanup work
• Telemetry ping size issues
• Tracking about:telemetry work and improvements

Communication

Communication Type	Mechanism	Audience
Asking questions	#telemetry on irc.mozilla.org	devs
General discussion	dev-platform and fhr-dev list	devs
Announcements	dev-platform, dev-planning lists	all

People

Project Champion
Program Management
Product	Benjamin Smedberg, Vladan Djeric
UX
Client Engineering	Vladan Djeric, Georg Fritzsche, Alessio Placitelli
Server Engineering	Mark Reid
Data Analysis	Roberto Vitillo
Privacy	Sid Stamm
Legal	Jishnu Menon

Reference

Out of date:

• Performance/Telemetry page
• Probe implementation
• Telemetry Privacy Review
• Telemetry Experiments QA