First big project commit as pull request

[jaredhirsch]

I've added the whole team as admins on this repo. Comments and questions very welcome.

Take a look at my branch to see the formatted README and API docs: https://github.com/6a68/testpilot-metrics/tree/test

I'll plan to land this EOD Tuesday, unless there are major concerns :-)

[meandavejustice]

Some experiments (min-vid for example) send extra fields to metrics. We should add another parameter to handle this data. example data

in progress branch to integrate testpilot-metrics on min-vid

[jaredhirsch]

Some experiments (min-vid for example) send extra fields to metrics. We should add another parameter to handle this data.

Good point. The simplest solution here seems to be: let experiments pass extra key/value pairs in the object. This works fine for Firefox client metrics, but GA doesn't support random extra named parameters.

GA does support custom dimensions, though they are just named cd1 up to cd200. This seems like a rather fancy use case, compared with "does event/object demonstrate DAU growth".

Maybe the best thing is to let fancy experiment authors solve their own problems: I'll add support for a transform function parameter that is called to transform the ping object into a set of GA parameters ready to be encoded and sent. Adding transform would solve a related issue where testpilot-metrics, currently, only uses the GA event type, while some experiments might want to use other GA hit types. I'll add that tonight.

[meandavejustice]

@6a68 That sounds like a good compromise, thanks Jared

[lmorchard]

I'll add support for a transform function parameter that is called to transform the ping object into a set of GA parameters ready to be encoded and sent.

Does that mean, conversely, that whatever object gets passed in to sendEvent() will be sent as-is to Telemetry? (i.e. rather than stripped down to id, event, & object?) If so then :+1:

(Also guessing a transform function would resolve my confusion about the GA params too, if I'm assembling them in my own code.)

[lmorchard]

FWIW, I've got a hacky start at integrating this into Snooze Tabs. The parameters seem a little confusing to me, but I was able to get some data flowing to GA in the realtime view:

[jaredhirsch]

Does that mean, conversely, that whatever object gets passed in to sendEvent() will be sent as-is to Telemetry?

Yup! That's the idea...excluding the transform function, of course ;-)

[jaredhirsch]

Made some changes, just about to squash, push, and merge. Just FYI for those who reviewed:

• Fixed all the little review comments, thanks for those :+1:
• Send the entire object to Telemetry
• Bunch of annoying little parameter changes:
  • Renamed 'cid' to 'uid', after realizing that 'cid' is always a uuidv4, but 'uid' can be whatever
  • Removed 'study', just made 'variant' the lone A/B testing parameter, with a new convention of using the first GA Custom Dimension for it. As ckprice pointed out, the GA experiment stuff is really complex and not what we want.
  • Add a mandatory 'version' (addon version) parameter to the constructor, and pass it to GA as the app version parameter. This assumes we are using the app GA view, not the web GA view. Documented this assumption in the GA setup steps in the README (which are new).
  • Rearrange the GA values corresponding to 'event' and 'object'. Event should be the action, and object the label, not the other way around.
  • Added the transform sendEvent parameter, and documented its use.
  • Updated the example docs and tests to use the new parameters.
• The GA docs specifically mention using %20, not +, to encode spaces, even though the Measurement Protocol uses the x-www-formurlencodedcontent-type, so, switched back to using%20` for spaces.