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permalink: "/{{ year }}/{{ month }}/{{ day }}/glean-in-2021"
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title: "This Week in Glean: Looking back at Glean in 2021"
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published_date: "2021-12-17 15:00:00 +0100"
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layout: post.liquid
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data:
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route: blog
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---
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(“This Week in Glean” is a series of blog posts that the Glean Team at Mozilla is using to try to communicate better about our work. They could be release notes, documentation, hopes, dreams, or whatever: so long as it is inspired by Glean.)
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All "This Week in Glean" blog posts are listed in the [TWiG index](https://mozilla.github.io/glean/book/appendix/twig.html)
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(and on the [Mozilla Data blog](https://blog.mozilla.org/data/category/glean/)).
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This article is [cross-posted on the Mozilla Data blog][datablog].
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[datablog]: https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2021/12/17/this-week-in-glean-glean-in-2021
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---
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A year ago I posted [Glean in 2021](/2020/12/18/glean-in-2021/) as a way to look into the future
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and set out a vision and plan for the project.
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Today I'm looking back at 2021, if we were able to follow up on my plans back then and look at all the other things we did for Glean.
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Let's start easy:
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According to [the index](https://mozilla.github.io/glean/book/appendix/twig.html) we wrote 21 This Week in Glean blog posts (including this one).
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Close enough to one every other week.
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Communicating about our work is important and TWiGs are one way to put our ideas and thoughts about the project out there.
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Let's first look at the topics I identified as important in last year's blog post.
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## The vision
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> The Glean SDK is a fully self-servable telemetry SDK, usable across different platforms.
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> It enables product owners and engineers to instrument their products and rely on their data collection,
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> while following Mozilla policies & privacy standards.
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I'd say we're in pretty good shape here.
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The docs on [how to add Glean to a project][adding-glean] need some updates,
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but we also added a post for a slightly different audience: [Integrating Glean for product managers][glean-for-pms],
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so it's not only for engineers anymore.
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We assisted others when they integrated Glean, but more for general data and instrumentation knowledge.
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[adding-glean]: https://mozilla.github.io/glean/book/user/adding-glean-to-your-project/index.html
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[glean-for-pms]: https://mozilla.github.io/glean/book/user/integrating-glean-for-product-managers.html
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## The ideas
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### Metric types
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We specified & implemented 3 new metric types this year.
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The [`rate` metric][rate] has been implemented in the Rust and JavaScript SDKs and is also available on Firefox Desktop.
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The [`url` metric][url] is available in all SDKs, but not yet exposed on Firefox Desktop.
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The [`text` metric][text] is currently JavaScript-only.
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However the `url` and `text` metric were not usable until recently because of bugs in our schema generation tool.
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We had to change how we generate the table schema for these and other metric types in the future a bit,
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but the pipeline now correctly ingests data for these metrics
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and users can query the data in the columns where they expect them.
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[rate]: https://mozilla.github.io/glean/book/reference/metrics/rate.html
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[url]: https://mozilla.github.io/glean/book/reference/metrics/url.html
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[text]: https://mozilla.github.io/glean/book/reference/metrics/text.html
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### Revamped testing APIs
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We implemented some of the new testing APIs, namely [metric coverage support][coverage-support] and [`Ping.testBeforeNextSubmit`][beforeNextSubmit].
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Glean and FOG already use these new testing capabilities, but to my knowledge other Glean users are not yet relying on that.
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Certainly an area we should make more progress on in the coming year.
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[coverage-support]: https://github.com/mozilla/glean/pull/1482
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[beforeNextSubmit]: https://github.com/mozilla/glean/pull/1507
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### UniFFI - generate all the code
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Migration to rely on [UniFFI] for code generation has started!
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Right now adding new features to Glean [requires changes across all SDKs](https://mozilla.github.io/glean/dev/core/new-metric-type.html).
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With UniFFI we can define the API of metric types once, implement it in Rust and get the code for the SDKs generated automatically.
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Less manual code means less potential for bugs and easier maintenance.
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The [`uniffi` branch][uniffi-branch] is used for slowly migrating Glean piece by piece.
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Most of the metric types are [defined in UDL now][glean.udl] and the Kotlin code base has been migrated to it already,
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with all tests passing again.
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Work on this will continue next year, migrating the Swift, Python and Rust SDKs and then eventually merging it back into the main branch,
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so we can ship it to users.
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From there adding new metrics will require less implementation work and thus will allow us to follow up with some of the existing but currently paused requests.
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[uniffi]: https://github.com/mozilla/uniffi-rs/
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[uniffi-branch]: https://github.com/mozilla/glean/tree/uniffi
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[glean.udl]: https://github.com/badboy/glean/blob/4ae34b0f217160924a8c74165e387e190937fd33/glean-core/src/glean.udl
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## All the other things
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### Glean
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We [released][release-page] 9 major versions of Glean and did 33 releases in total.
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We're very liberal with breaking changes & major releases,
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though we make sure that upgrades require minimal changes where possible.
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The Kotlin, Swift, Python & Rust SDKs are versioned all the same,
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so a breaking change in only one SDK will still cause a major release for other SDKs, even without breaking changes.
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More products and projects are now using Glean, including [Rally studies][rally], the [Mozilla VPN client][vpn], and the new version of [Focus for Android](https://dictionary.telemetry.mozilla.org/apps/focus_android).
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A full list of products is available in the [Glean Dictionary][dictionary].
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[release-page]: https://github.com/mozilla/glean/releases
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[rally]: https://rally.mozilla.org/
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[vpn]: https://www.mozilla.org/products/vpn/
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[dictionary]: https://dictionary.telemetry.mozilla.org/
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To ease integration between telemetry collected in Gecko and telemetry collected in the Android parts of the browser
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we're now [shipping Glean through GeckoView][geckoview]. (After [crashing it][crash], fixing it and shipping it again without new bugs cropping up.)
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There's some work to be done next year to make local development easier again and to automate some of the tasks of upgading Glean across applications.
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[geckoview]: https://fnordig.de/2021/09/17/glean-geckoview/
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[crash]: https://fnordig.de/2021/11/01/crashes-and-a-buggy-glean/
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### Firefox on Glean (FOG)
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We invested a lot of time in making the Firefox integration better,
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fixing bugs and convincing people to migrate their instrumentation to the new Glean-based system.
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It's going slow, but we now have the [first few important metrics][fog-dictionary] in Glean pings coming from Firefox Desktop.
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Additionally Glean was used to provide telemetry for the new [Desktop Background Updater][fog-bgupdate].
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Next year we hope to convince more people to start using Glean in Desktop,
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with the added benefit that this data will also be available in Firefox for Android.
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[fog-dictionary]: https://dictionary.telemetry.mozilla.org/apps/firefox_desktop
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[fog-bgupdate]: https://dictionary.telemetry.mozilla.org/apps/firefox_desktop_background_update
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### Glean.js
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A year ago [Glean.js was just started][gleanjs-initial].
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Thanks to Bea's tireless work it's now nearly feature-complete compared to the other Glean SDKs
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and used in production in applications & web extensions and soon even used to instrument websites.
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Next year Bea aims for a proper stable v1.0 release and hopefully more use across different products.
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It's a real alternative for those platforms where the inital set of SDKs don't cut it.
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Glean surely is becoming the one telemetry solution across Mozilla products.
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[gleanjs-initial]: https://github.com/mozilla/glean.js/commit/46f028fb4ea7b8f312daf4666904c81d0a3eb171
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### Tooling: GLAM, Dictionary, Looker
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These are the tools I'm much less directly involved in,
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but they make up an important part of the Glean ecosystem.
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Afterall these are where users actually get to analyse at the data they collect.
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[GLAM] currently only serves data for Firefox Desktop using legacy telemetry data as well as Firefox for Android using Glean data.
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Things are in place to enable more Glean-powered products soon, once we [iron out some details around data expectations from applications][build-date].
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[GLAM]: https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/cookbooks/glam.html
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The [Glean Dictionary][dictionary] saw near-weekly releases
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and went from "promising prototype" into "valuable production tool" this year,
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thanks to a lot of work from [wlach] and [linh].
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It was the basis of several initiatives such as [metric annotations][annotations] and [tagging support][tags].
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These things will be helpful to make data at Mozilla more discoverable and better documented.
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The primary tool for analyzing data at Mozilla is now [Looker].
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Folks have been very busy making more and more data accessible to both data experts and non-experts alike[^1].
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Glean data is (more or less) automatically available in Looker explores, for example [event counts](https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/cookbooks/looker/event_counts_explore.html).
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Instead of bringing up adhoc dashboards for initiatives when needed we can usually recommend that people just build things in Looker.
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That has the major advantage that exploration beyond what the dashboard summarizes is just one or two clicks away.
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I'm excited to shift my own use away from [fiddling around with SQL][sql] to more approachable explores & dashboards,
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even for one-time analysis.
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[build-date]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1742448
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[wlach]: https://github.com/wlach
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[linh]: https://github.com/Iinh
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[annotations]: https://github.com/mozilla/glean-annotations/
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[tags]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1734011
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[looker]: https://looker.com/
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[sql]: https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/tools/stmo.html
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---
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## 2022
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I'm saving an outlook on the next year of Glean for some other time.
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I called out some areas of work above that will see more work next year,
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and then there's also new projects & ideas coming up.
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I still plan to continue work on Glean for the vast majority of my time.
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## Thanks
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The This Week in Glean series is going into winter hiatus until January 2022.
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Thanks to everyone who contributed to This Week in Glean blog posts in 2021:
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Alessio, Travis, Chutten, Bea, Raphael, Anthony, Will.
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And of course thanks to everyone who contributed to Glean and the wider ecosystem around it.
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---
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_Footnotes:_
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[^1]: We have some [pretty cool documentation to get you started with Looker!](https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/cookbooks/looker/intro.html)
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