Socorro: This Period in Crash Stats: Volume 2021.1

Crash Stats crash report view pages show Breadcrumbs information

In 2020q3, Roger and I worked out a new Breadcrumbs crash annotation for crash reports generated by the android-components crash reporter. It's a JSON-encoded field with a structure just like the one that the sentry-sdk sends. Incoming crash reports that have this annotation will show the data on the crash report view page to people who have protected data access.

I implemented it based on what we get in the structure and what's in the Sentry interface.

Breadcrumbs information is not searchable with Supersearch. Currently, it's only shown in the crash report view in the Details tab.

Does this help your work? Are there ways to improve this? If so, let me know!

This work was done in [bug 1671276].

Crash Stats crash report view pages show Java exceptions

For the longest of long times, crash reports from a Java process included a JavaStackTrace annotation which was a big unstructured string of problematic parseability and I couldn't do much with it.

In 2020q4, Roger and I worked out a new JavaException crash annotation which was a JSON-encoded structured string containing the exception information. Not only does it have the final exception, but it also has cascading exceptions if there are any! With a structured form of the exception, we can suddenly do a lot of interesting things.

As a first step, I added display of the Java exception information to the crash report view page in the Display tab. It's in the same place that you would see the crashing thread stack if this were a C++/Rust crash.

Just like JavaStackTrace, the JavaException annotation has some data in it that can have PII in it. Because of that, the Socorro processor generates two versions of the data: one that's sanitized (no java exception message values) and one that's raw. If you have protected data access, you can see the raw one.

The interface is pretty wide and exceeds the screenshot. Sorry about that.

My next step is to use the structured exception information to improve Java crash report signatures. I'm doing that work in [bug 1541120] and hoping to land that in 2021q1. More on that later.

Does this help your work? Are there ways to improve this? If so, let me know!

This work was done in [bug 1675560].

Changes to crash report view

One of the things I don't like about the crash report view is that it's impossible to intuit where the data you're looking at is from. Further, some of the tabs were unclear about what bits of data were protected data and what bits weren't. I've been improving that over time.

The most recent step involved the following changes:

1. The "Metadata" tab was renamed to "Crash Annotations". This tab holds the crash annotation data from the raw crash before processing as well as a few fields that the collector adds when accepting a crash report from the client. Most of the fields are defined in the CrashAnnotations.yaml file in mozilla-central. The ones that aren't, yet, should get added. I have that on my list of things to get to.

2. The "Crash Annotations" tab is now split into public and protected data sections. I hope this makes it a little clearer which is which.

3. I removed some unneeded fields that the collector adds at ingestion.

Does this help your work? Are there ways to improve this? If so, let me know!

Remove the Email field

Last year, I looked into who's using the Email field and for what, whether the data was any good, and in what circumstances do we even get Email data. That work was done in [bug 1626277].

The consensus is that since not all of the crash reporter clients let a user enter in an email address, it doesn't seem like we use the data, and it's pretty toxic data to have, we should remove it.

The first step of that is to delete the field from the crash report at ingestion. I'll be doing that work in [bug 1688905].

The second step is to remove it from the webapp. I'll be doing that work in [bug 1688907].

Once that's done, I'll write up some bugs to remove it from the crash reporter clients and wherever else it is in products.

Does this affect you? If so, let me know!

Redo signature generation for Java crashes

Currently, signature generation for Java crashes is pretty basic and it's not flexible in the ways we need it. Now we can fix that.

I need some Java crash expertise to bounce ideas off of and to help me verify "goodness" of signatures. If you're interested in helping in any capacity or if you have opinions on how it should work or what you need out of it, please let me know.

I'm hoping to do this work in 2021q1.

The tracker bug is [bug 1541120].