Mission Control update

Yep, still working on this project. We’ve shifted gears somewhat from trying to identify problems in a time series of error aggregates to tracking somewhat longer term trends release over release, to fill the needs of the release management team at Mozilla. It’s been a good change, I think. A bit of a tighter focus.

The main motivator for this work is that the ADI (active daily install) numbers that crash stats used to provide as input to a similar service, AreWeStableYet (link requires Mozilla credentials), are going away and we need some kind of replacement. I’ve been learning about this older system worked (this blog post from KaiRo was helpful) and trying to develop a replacement which reproduces some of its useful characteristics while also taking advantage of some of the new features that are provided by the error_aggregates dataset and the mission control user interface.

Some preliminary screenshots of what I’ve been able to come up with:

One of the key things to keep in mind with this dashboard is that by default it shows an adjusted set of rates (defined as total number of events divided by total usage khours), which means we compare the latest release to the previous one within the same time interval.

So if, say, the latest release is “59” and it’s been out for two weeks, we will compare it against the previous release (“58”) in its first two weeks. As I’ve said here before, things are always crashier when they first go out, and comparing a new release to one that has been out in the field for some time is not a fair comparison at all.

This adjusted view of things is still not apples-to-apples: the causality of crashes and errors is so complex that there will always be differences between releases which are beyond our control or even understanding. Many crash reports, for example, have nothing to do with our product but with third party software and web sites beyond our control. That said, I feel like this adjusted rate is still good enough to tell us (broadly speaking) (1) whether our latest release / beta / nightly is ok (i.e. there is no major showstopper issue) and (2) whether our overall error rate is going up or down over several versions (if there is a continual increase in our crash rate, it might point to a problem in our release/qa process).

Interestingly, the first things that we’ve found with this system are not real problems with the product but data collection issues:

• we don’t seem to be collecting counts of gmplugin crashes on Windows anymore via telemetry
• the number of content_shutdown_crashes is greater than the number of content_crashes, even though the former is a superset of the latter

Data issues aside, the indications are that there’s been a steady increase in the quality of Firefox over the last few releases based on the main user facing error metric we’ve cared about in the past (main crashes), so that’s good. :)

If you want to play with the system yourself, the development instance is still up. We will probably look at making this thing “official” next quarter.