Re: Firefox data engineering newsletter, Q1 2018

[Susheel Daswani]

Hi Georg, thanks for rolling this up! As you know Android / Mobile is a
huge focus for all of Mozilla in 2018 - can you please call out which of
your 2018 focus areas incorporate improvements for Android / Mobile?

On Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 11:20 AM, Georg Fritzsche 
wrote:

> As the Firefox data engineering teams we provide core tools for using data
> to other teams. This spans from collection through *Firefox Telemetry*,
> storage & processing in our *Data Platform* to making data available in *Data
> Tools*.
>
> To make new developments more visible we aim to publish a quarterly
> newsletter. As we skipped one, some important items from Q4 are also
> highlighted this time.
>
> This year our teams are putting their main focus on:
>
>-
>
>Making experimentation easy & powerful.
>-
>
>Providing a low-latency view into product release health.
>-
>
>Making it easy to work with events end-to-end.
>-
>
>Addressing important user issues with our tools.
>
>
> *Usage improvements*
>
> Last year we started to investigate how our various tools are used by
> people working on Firefox in different roles. From that we started
> addressing some of the main issues users have.
>
> Most centrally, the Telemetry portal  is
> now the main entry point to our tools, documentation and other resources.
> When working with Firefox data you will find all the important tools linked
> from there.
>
> We added the probe dictionary
>  to make it easy to find
> what data we have about Firefox usage.
>
> For STMO , our Redash instance, we 
> deployed
> a major UI refresh
> 
> from the upstream project.
>
> There is new documentation on prototyping
> 
> and optimizing
>  STMO
> queries.
>
> Our data documentation  saw many
> other updates, from cookbooks on how to see your own pings
>  and sending
> new pings  to
> adding more datasets
> . We
> also added documentation on how our data pipeline works
> .
>
>
> *Enabling experimentation*
>
> For experimentation, we have focused on improving tooling. Test Tube
>  will soon be our main
> experiment dashboard, replacing experiments viewer. It displays the results
> of multivariant experiments that are being conducted within Firefox.
>
> We now have St. Moab  as a toolkit for
> automatically generating experiment dashboards.
>
>
> *Working with event data*
>
> To make working with events easier, we improved multiple stages in the
> pipeline. Our documentation has an overview
> 
> of the data flow.
>
> On the Firefox side, events can now be recorded through the events API
> ,
> from add-ons
> ,
> and whitelisted Firefox content
> .
> From Firefox 61, all recorded events are automatically counted into
> scalars , to easily
> get summary statistics.
>
> Event data is available for analysis in Redash in different datasets
> .
> We can now also connect more event data to Amplitude
> , a product analytics tool. A connection for some
> mobile events to Amplitude is live, for Firefox Desktop events it will be
> available soon.
>
>
> *Low-latency release health data*
>
> To enable low-latency views into release health data, we are working on
> improving Mission Control ,
> which will soon replace arewestableyet.com
> .
>
> It has new features
>  that
> enable comparing quality measures like crashes release-over-release across
> channels.
>
>
> *Firefox Telemetry tools*
>
> For Firefox instrumentation we expanded on the event recording APIs
> .
> To make build 

Firefox data engineering newsletter, Q1 2018

[Georg Fritzsche]

As the Firefox data engineering teams we provide core tools for using data
to other teams. This spans from collection through *Firefox Telemetry*,
storage & processing in our *Data Platform* to making data available in *Data
Tools*.

To make new developments more visible we aim to publish a quarterly
newsletter. As we skipped one, some important items from Q4 are also
highlighted this time.

This year our teams are putting their main focus on:

   -

   Making experimentation easy & powerful.
   -

   Providing a low-latency view into product release health.
   -

   Making it easy to work with events end-to-end.
   -

   Addressing important user issues with our tools.


*Usage improvements*

Last year we started to investigate how our various tools are used by
people working on Firefox in different roles. From that we started
addressing some of the main issues users have.

Most centrally, the Telemetry portal  is
now the main entry point to our tools, documentation and other resources.
When working with Firefox data you will find all the important tools linked
from there.

We added the probe dictionary
 to make it easy to find
what data we have about Firefox usage.

For STMO , our Redash instance, we deployed
a major UI refresh
 from
the upstream project.

There is new documentation on prototyping

and optimizing
 STMO
queries.

Our data documentation  saw many other
updates, from cookbooks on how to see your own pings
 and sending
new pings  to
adding more datasets
. We
also added documentation on how our data pipeline works
.


*Enabling experimentation*

For experimentation, we have focused on improving tooling. Test Tube
 will soon be our main experiment
dashboard, replacing experiments viewer. It displays the results of
multivariant experiments that are being conducted within Firefox.

We now have St. Moab  as a toolkit for
automatically generating experiment dashboards.


*Working with event data*

To make working with events easier, we improved multiple stages in the
pipeline. Our documentation has an overview

of the data flow.

On the Firefox side, events can now be recorded through the events API
,
from add-ons
,
and whitelisted Firefox content
.
From Firefox 61, all recorded events are automatically counted into scalars
, to easily get
summary statistics.

Event data is available for analysis in Redash in different datasets
.
We can now also connect more event data to Amplitude
, a product analytics tool. A connection for some
mobile events to Amplitude is live, for Firefox Desktop events it will be
available soon.


*Low-latency release health data*

To enable low-latency views into release health data, we are working on
improving Mission Control ,
which will soon replace arewestableyet.com 
.

It has new features
 that enable
comparing quality measures like crashes release-over-release across
channels.


*Firefox Telemetry tools*

For Firefox instrumentation we expanded on the event recording APIs
.
To make build turnaround times faster, we now support adding scalars in
artifact builds

and will soon extend this to events
.

Following the recent Firefox data preferences changes, we adopted Telemetry

to only differentiate between "release" and "prerelease" data.

This also impacted the