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.

Accessing the 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 talks:

• Telemetry Onboarding
• Zen and the Art of Telemetry

Telemetry client-side:

• MDN: Adding a new Telemetry probe
  • Histogram Simulator
  • Data collection policy
• Telemetry ping format (in-tree documentation)
  • Older ping formats
• Adding a new Telemetry ping type
  • Known Telemetry ping types: Telemetry/PingTypes
• Telemetry Experiments

Telemetry back-end:

• Data Pipeline Documentation : CloudServices/DataPipeline

Telemetry Aggregates:

• Telemetry aggregation pipeline
• telemetry.js
• Dashboard Generator

Analyzing Telemetry:

• Choosing a Dataset
• Writing custom analyses:
  • Writing custom real-time analysis with Hindsight
  • Writing custom analysis jobs with Spark
  • Custom dashboards with re:dash
  • Working with the longitudinal dataset
  • Telemetry Quirks: things to watch out for when analyzing Telemetry data

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

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.

Data Pipeline related bugs should be filed in one of the components in Data Platform and Tools

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

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 fx-data-dev list	devs
Announcements	dev-platform, dev-planning lists	all