Crash Reporting Headlines (April 7th, 2021)

[William Kahn-Greene]

Hi!

(cross-posted to firefox-dev)

Earlier this year, I did a Crash Stats centric newsletter. There's more going on in crash reporting than work on Crash Stats, so I'm adjusting this to be broader.

Here's the status updates for crash reporting.

Quick summary

• Started Crash Reporting Working Group
• We started a Crash Reporting Working Group to coordinate crash reporting, ingestion, and analysis work. If you're interested in participating or lurking, we've got a mailing list (crash-reporting-wg) and a Matrix channel (#crashreporting)
• Socorro: Ended collection of Email address data.
• Firefox 89+ no longer sends Email address data in crash reports.
• Email data is dropped at collection for all crash reports.
  
• Socorro: Ended collection of Fennec crash reports.
• Tecken: We need help testing new symbolication API microservice.

Details

Completed

• Crash Stats: Improved preview in Slack/Matrix for crash report view urls and signature report view urls.
• If there's more I can do with this to make these url previews more helpful in conversations, let me know.
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1688203
• Socorro: End collection of Email data in crash reports.
• I changed the collector to delete Email data for all incoming crash reports. I fixed the Firefox main and content crash reporter client code. I still have some changes to make in the webapp, but I'm waiting until May 2021 to do that.
• Many thanks to Emily, Nneka, Gabriele, Mike, and Chris for their help with this!
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1688883
• Socorro: End collection of crash reports for Fennec
• When working on ending collection of Email data, it came up that we don't need Fennec crash reports anymore. Thus Socorro now rejects all incoming crash reports for Fennec.
• Many thanks to Emily, Stefan, Vesta, and Agi!
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1699239
• Crash Stats: Fixed the webapp to automatically update the PCI device db once a week.
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1166058
• Crash stats: Redid "Raw data and minidumps" tab in crash report view.
• The Crash Stats ui is confusing and clunky and I've been trying to fix bits of it over time. In this pass, I improved the tab that holds links to raw and processed crash data, minidumps, and the output of minidump-stackwalk. It should be clearer now as to what's protected data and what isn't. The links are at the top of the tab where they're easier to access. The minidump-stackwalk output is much easier to manipulate and use.
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1696910
• Tecken: New symbolication API microservices
• The symbolication API that Tecken has is hard to improve and there are a bunch of things we want to do with it. Because of that, I embarked on splitting it out into a separate microservice and rewriting it from the ground up using the Symbolic library. That's taken a while for a variety of reasons, but we've now got a working symbolication API in our staging environment that I think is usable.
• API url: https://symbolication.stage.mozaws.net/symbolicate/v5
• I need to write docs for it, but it uses the same payload as the existing symbolication API as documented here:
• https://tecken.readthedocs.io/en/latest/symbolication.html#symbolication-symbolicate-v5
• If you do any symbolication work, I'd love to know how it works for you and whether you encounter any issues.
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1636210

In progress

• Crash reporter client: integrating Windows Error Reporting into Firefox
  
• Tecken: Finishing up the new symbolication API microservice: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1636210
• Socorro: Better signature generation for Java crash reports: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1541120

If this is missing something, please let us know!

/will