# Measuring product engagment at scale

How engaged are our users for a certain segment of the population? How many users are actively using a new feature? One way to answer that question is to compute the  engagement ratio (ER) for that segment, which is defined as daily active users (DAU) over monthly active users (MAU), i.e.

$ER_{segment} = \frac{DAU_{segment}}{MAU_{segment}}$

Intuitively the closer the ratio is to 1, the higher the number of returning users. A segment can be an arbitrary combination of values across a set of dimensions, like operating system and activity date.

Ideally, given a set of $D$ dimensions, pre-computing the ER for all possible combinations of values of said dimensions would ensure that user queries run as fast as possible. Clearly that’s not very efficient though; if we assume for simplicity that every dimension has $k$ possible values, then there are $\sum_{d=1}^{D}\binom{D}{d} k^d$ ratios.

Is there a way around computing all of those ratios while still having an acceptable query latency? One could build a set of users for each value of each dimension and then at query time simply use set union and set intersection to compute any desired segment. Unfortunately that doesn’t work when you have millions of users as the storage complexity is proportional to the number of items stored in the sets. This is where probabilistic counting and the HyperLogLog sketch comes into play.

HyperLogLog

The HyperLogLog sketch can estimate cardinalities well beyond $10^9$ with a standard error of 2% while only using a couple of KB of memory.

The intuition behind is simple. Imagine a hash function that maps user identifiers to a string of N bits. A good hash function ensures that each bit has the same probability of being flipped. If that’s the case then the following is true:

• 50 % of hashes have the prefix 1
• 25 % of hashes have the prefix 01
• 12.5% of hashes the prefix 001

Intuitively, if 4 distinct values are hashed we would expect to see on average one single hash with a prefix of 01 while for 8 distinct values we would expect to see one hash with a prefix of 001 and so on. In other words, the cardinality of the original set can be estimated from the longest prefix of zeros of the hashed values. To reduce the variability of this single estimator, the average of K estimators can be used as the approximated cardinality and it can be shown that the standard error of a HLL sketch is $\frac{1.04}{sqrt(K)}$.

The detailed algorithm is documented in the original paper, and its practical implementation and variants are covered in depth by a 2013 paper from Google.

Set operations

One of the nice properties of HLL is that the union of two HLL sketches is very simple to compute as the union of a single estimator with another estimator is just the maximum of the two estimators, i.e. the longest prefix of zeros. This property makes the algorithm trivially parallelizable which makes it well suited for map-reduce style computations.

What about set intersection? There are two ways to compute that for e.g. two sets:

• Using the inclusion-exclusion principle: $|A \cap B| = |A| + |B| - |A \cup B|$.
• Using the MinHash (MH) sketch, which estimates the Jaccard index that measures how similar two sets are: $\frac{|A \cap B|}{|A \cup B|}$. Given the MH sketch one could estimate the intersection with $|A \cap B| \approx MH(A, B) \times |A \cup B|$.

It turns out that both approaches yield bad approximations when the overlap is small, which makes set intersection not particularly attractive for many use-cases, which is why we decided to use only the union operation for HLL sketches for our datasets.

Going back to the original problem of estimating the ER for an arbitrary segment, by computing the HLL sketches for all combinations of values across all dimensions the HLL sketch for any segment can be derived using set union.

Implementation

At Mozilla we use both Spark and Presto for analytics and even though both support HLL  their implementation is not compatible, i.e. Presto can’t read HLL sketches serialized from Spark. To that end we created a Spark package, spark-hyperloglog, and a Presto plugin, presto-hyperloglog, to extend both systems with the same HLL implementation.

Usage

Mozilla employees can access the client_count table from re:dash and run Presto queries against it to compute DAU, MAU or the ER for a certain segment. For example, this is how DAU faceted by channel and activity date can be computed:


SELECT normalizedchannel,
activitydate,
cardinality(merge(cast(hll AS HLL))) AS hll
FROM client_count
GROUP BY activitydate, normalizedchannel
ORDER BY normalizedchannel, activitydate DESC



The merge aggregate function computes the set union while the cardinality function returns the cardinality of a sketch. A complete example with DAU, MAU and ER for the electrolysis engagement ratio can be seen here.

By default the HLL sketches in the client_count table have a standard error of about 1.6%.

# Longitudinal studies with Telemetry

Unified Telemetry (UT) replaced both Telemetry and FHR at the end of last year. FHR has been historically used to answer longitudinal questions, such as churn, while Telemetry has mainly been used for performance studies.

In UT-land, multiple self-contained submissions are generated for a profile over time in contrast to FHR for which submissions contained all historical records. With the new format, a typical longitudinal query on the raw data requires conceptually a big group-by on the profile ID over all submissions to recreate the history for each profile. To avoid the expensive grouping operation we are providing a longitudinal batch view of our Telemetry dataset.

The longitudinal view is logically organized as a table where rows represent profiles and columns the various metrics (e.g. startup time). Each field of the table contains a list of chronologically sorted values, one per Telemetry submission received for that profile. Even though each profile could have been represented as an array of structures with Parquet, ultimately we decided to represent it as a structure of arrays to deal with some inefficiencies in reading nested data from Spark.

The dataset is periodically regenerated from scratch, which allows us to apply non backward compatible changes to the schema and not worry about merging procedures.

The  dataset can be accessed from Mozilla’s Spark clusters as a DataFrame:


frame = sqlContext.sql(SELECT * FROM longitudinal)



The view contains several thousand measures, which include all histograms and a large part of our scalar metrics stored in the various sections of Telemetry submissions.

frame.printSchema()

root
|-- profile_id: string
|-- normalized_channel: string
|-- submission_date: array
|    |-- element: string
|-- build: array
|    |-- element: struct
|    |    |-- application_id: string
|    |    |-- application_name: string
|    |    |-- architecture: string
|    |    |-- architectures_in_binary: string
|    |    |-- build_id: string
|    |    |-- version: string
|    |    |-- vendor: string
|    |    |-- platform_version: string
|    |    |-- xpcom_abi: string
|    |    |-- hotfix_version: string
...


A Jupyter notebook with example queries that use the longitudinal dataset is available on Spark clusters launched from a.t.m.o.

# Telemetry meets Parquet

In Mozilla’s Telemetry land, raw JSON pings are stored on S3 within files containing framed Heka records, which form our immutable, append-only master dataset. Reading the raw data with Spark can be slow for analyses that read only a handful of fields per record from the thousands available; not to mention the cost of parsing the JSON blobs in the first place.

We are slowly moving away from JSON to a more OLAP-friendly serialization format for the master dataset, which requires defining a proper schema. Given that we have been collecting data in big JSON payloads since the beginning of time, different subsystems have been using various, in some cases schema un-friendly, data layouts. That and the fact that we have thousands of fields embedded in a complex nested structure makes it hard to retrospectively enforce a schema that matches our current data, so a change is likely not going to happen overnight.

Until recently the only way to process Telemetry data with Spark was to read the raw data directly, which isn’t efficient but gets the job done.

Batch views

Some analyses require filtering out a considerable amount of data before the actual workload can start. To improve the efficiency of such jobs, we started defining derived streams, or so called pre-computed batch views in lambda’s architecture lingo.

A batch view is regenerated or updated daily and, in a mathematical sense, it’s simply a function over the entire master dataset. The view usually contains a subset of the master dataset, possibly transformed, with the objective to make analyses that depend on it more efficient.

As a concrete example, we have run an A/B test on Aurora 43 in which we disabled or enabled Electrolysis (E10s) based on a coin flip (note that E10s is enabled by default on Aurora). In this particular experiment we were aiming to study the performance of E10s. The experiment had a lifespan of one week per user. As some of our users access Firefox sporadically, we couldn’t just sample a few days worth of data and be done with it as ignoring the long tail of submissions would have biased our results.

We clearly needed a batch view of our master dataset that contained only submissions for users that were currently enrolled in the experiment, in order to avoid an expensive filtering step.

Parquet

We decided to serialize the data for our batch views back to S3 as Parquet files. Parquet is a columnar file storage that is slowly becoming the lingua franca of Hadoop’s ecosystem as it can be read and written from e.g. Hive, Pig & Spark.

Conceptually it’s important to clarify that Parquet is just a storage format, i.e. a binary representation of the data, and it relies on object models, like the one provided by Avro or Thrift, to represent the data in memory. A set of object model converters are provided to map between the in-memory representation and the storage format.

Parquet supports efficient compression and encoding schemes, which are applied on a per-column level where the data tends to be homogeneous. Furthermore, as Spark can load parquet files in a Dataframe, a Python analysis can potentially experience the same performance as a Scala one thanks to a unified physical execution layer.

A Parquet file is composed of:

• row groups, which contain a subset of rows – a row group is composed of a set of column chunks;
• column chunks, which contain values for a specific column – a column chunk is partitioned in a set of pages;
• pages, which are the smallest level of granularity for reads – compression and encoding are applied at this level of abstraction
• a footer, which contains the schema and some other metadata.

As batch views typically use only a subset of the fields provided in our Telemetry payloads, the problem of defining a schema for such subset becomes a non-issue.

Benefits

Unsurpsingly, we have seen speed-ups of up to a couple of orders of magnitude in some analyses and a reduction of file size by up to 8x compared to files having the same compression scheme and content (no JSON, just framed Heka records).

Each view is generated with a Spark job. In the future Heka is likely going to produce the views directly, once it supports Parquet natively.

# Telemetry metrics roll-ups

Our Telemetry aggregation system has been serving us well for quite some time. As Telemetry evolved though, maintaining the codebase and adding new features such as keyed histograms has proven to be challenging. With the introduction of unified FHR/Telemetry, we decided to rewrite the aggregation pipeline with an updated set of requirements in mind.

Metrics

A ping is the data payload that clients submit to our server. The payload contains, among other things, over thousand metrics of the following types:

• numerical, like e.g. startup time
• categorical, like e.g. operating system name
• distributional, like e.g. garbage collection timings

Distributions are implemented with histograms that come in different shapes and sizes. For example, a keyed histogram represent a collection of labelled histograms. It’s not rare for keyed histograms to have thousands of possible labels. For instance, MISBEHAVING_ADDONS_JANK_LEVEL, which measures the longest blocking operation performed by an add-on, has potentially a label for each extensions.

The main objective of the aggregator is to create time or build-id based aggregates by a set of dimensions:

• channel, e.g. nightly
• build-id or submission date
• metric name, e.g. GC_MS
• label, for keyed histograms
• application name, e.g. Fennec
• application version, e.g. 41
• CPU architecture, e.g. x86_64
• operating system, e.g. Windows
• operating system version, e.g. 6.1
• e10s enabled
• process type, e.g. content or parent

As scalar and categorical metrics are converted to histograms during the aggregation, ultimately we display only distributions in our dashboard.

Raw Storage

We receive millions of pings each day over all our channels. A raw uncompressed ping has a size of over 100KB. Pings are sent to our edge servers and end up being stored in an immutable chunk of up to 300MB on S3, partitioned by submission date, application name, update channel, application version, and build id.

As we are currently collecting v4 submissions only on pre-release channels, we store about 700 GB per day; this considering only saved_session pings as those are the ones being aggregated. Once we start receiving data on the release channel as well we are likely going to double that number.

As soon as an immutable chunk is stored on S3, an AWS lambda function adds a corresponding entry to a SimpleDB index. The index allows Spark jobs to query the set of available pings by different criteria without the need of performing an expensive scan over S3.

Spark Aggregator

A daily scheduled Spark job performs the aggregation, on the data received the day before, by the set of dimensions mentioned above. We are likely going to move from a batch job to a streaming one in the future to reduce the latency from the time a ping is stored on S3 to the time its data appears in the dashboard.

Two kinds of aggregates are produced by aggregator:

• submission date based
• build-id based

Aggregates by build-id computed for a given submission date have to be added to the historical ones. As long as there are submissions coming from an old build of Firefox, we will keep receiving and aggregating data for it. The aggregation of the historical aggregates with the daily computed ones (i.e. partial aggregates) happens within a PostgreSQL database.

Database

There is only one type of table within the database which is partitioned by channel, version and build-id (or submission date depending on the aggregation type).

As PostgreSQL supports natively json blobs and arrays, it came naturally to express each row just as a couple of fields, one being a json object containing a set of dimensions and the other being an array representing the histogram. Adding a new dimension in the future should be rather painless as dimensions are not represented with columns.

When a new partial aggregate is pushed to the database, PostreSQL finds the current historical entry for that combination of dimensions, if it exists, and updates the current histogram by summing to it the partially aggregated histogram. In reality a temporary table is pushed to the database that contains all partial aggregates which is then merged with the historical aggregates, but the underlying logic remains the same.

As the database is usually queried by submission date or build-id and as there are milions of partial aggregates per day deriving from the possible combinations of dimensions, the table is partitioned the way it is to allow the upsert operation to be performed as fast as possible.

API

An inverted index on the json blobs allows to efficiently retrieve, and aggregate, all histograms matching a given filtering criteria.

For example,


select aggregate_histograms(histograms)
from build_id_nightly_41_20150602
where dimensions @&gt; '{"metric": "SIMPLE_MEASURES_UPTIME",
"application": "Firefox",
"os": "Windows"}'::jsonb;



retrieves a list of histograms, one for each combination of dimensions matching the where clause, and adds them together producing a final histogram that represents the distribution of the uptime measure for Firefox users on the nightly Windows build created on the 2nd of June 2015.

Aggregates are made available through a HTTP API. For example, to retrieve the aggregated histogram for the GC_MS metric on Windows for build-ids of the 2015/06/15 and 2015/06/16:

curl -X GET "http://aggregates.telemetry.mozilla.org/aggregates_by/build_id/channels/nightly/?version=41&dates=20150615&metric=GC_MS&os=Windows_NT"



which returns

{"buckets":[0, ..., 10000],
"data":[{"date":"20150615",
"count":239459,
"histogram":[309, ..., 5047],
"label":""}],
"kind":"exponential",
"description":"Time spent running JS GC (ms)"}



Dashboard

Our intern, Anthony Zhang, did a phenomenal job creating a nifty dashboard to display the aggregates. Even though it’s still under active development, it’s already functional and thanks to it we were able to spot a serious bug in the v2 aggregation pipeline.

It comes with two views, the histogram view designed for viewing distributions of measures:

and an evolution view for viewing the evolution of aggregate values for measures over time:

As we started aggregating data at the beginning of June, the evolution plot looks rightfully wacky before that date.

# Spark best practices

We have been running Spark for a while now at Mozilla and this post is a summary of things we have learned about tuning and debugging Spark jobs.

#### Spark execution model

Spark’s simplicity makes it all too easy to ignore its execution model and still manage to write jobs that eventually complete. With larger datasets having an understanding of what happens under the hood becomes critical to reduce run-time and avoid out of memory errors.

Let’s start by taking our good old word-count friend as starting example:

rdd = sc.textFile("input.txt")\
.flatMap(lambda line: line.split())\
.map(lambda word: (word, 1))\
.reduceByKey(lambda x, y: x + y, 3)\
.collect()


RDD operations are compiled into a Direct Acyclic Graph of RDD objects, where each RDD points to the parent it depends on:

At shuffle boundaries, the DAG is partitioned into so-called stages that are going to be executed in order, as shown in figure 2. The shuffle is Spark’s mechanism for re-distributing data so that it’s grouped differently across partitions. This typically involves copying data across executors and machines, making the shuffle a complex and costly operation.

To organize data for the shuffle, Spark generates sets of tasks – map tasks to organize the data and reduce tasks to aggregate it. This nomenclature comes from MapReduce and does not directly relate to Spark’s map and reduce operations. Operations within a stage are pipelined into tasks that can run in parallel, as shown in figure 3.

Stages, tasks and shuffle writes and reads are concrete concepts that can be monitored from the Spark UI. The UI can be accessed from the driver node on port 4040, as shown in figure 4.

#### Best practices

Spark UI

Running Spark jobs without the Spark UI is like flying blind. The UI allows to monitor and inspect the execution of jobs. To access it remotely a SOCKS proxy is needed as the UI connects also to the worker nodes.

Using a proxy management tool like FoxyProxy allows to automatically filter URLs based on text patterns and to limit the proxy settings to domains that match a set of rules. The browser add-on automatically handles turning the proxy on and off when you switch between viewing websites hosted on the master node, and those on the Internet.

Assuming that you launched your Spark cluster with the EMR service on AWS, type the following command to create a proxy:

ssh -i ~/mykeypair.pem -N -D 8157 hadoop@ec2-...-compute-1.amazonaws.com


Finally, import the following configuration into FoxyProxy:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<foxyproxy>
<proxies>
<proxy name="emr-socks-proxy" notes="" fromSubscription="false" enabled="true" mode="manual" selectedTabIndex="2" lastresort="false" animatedIcons="true" includeInCycle="true" color="#0055E5" proxyDNS="true" noInternalIPs="false" autoconfMode="pac" clearCacheBeforeUse="false" disableCache="false" clearCookiesBeforeUse="false" rejectCookies="false">
<matches>
<match enabled="true" name="*ec2*.amazonaws.com*" pattern="*ec2*.amazonaws.com*" isRegEx="false" isBlackList="false" isMultiLine="false" caseSensitive="false" fromSubscription="false" />
<match enabled="true" name="*ec2*.compute*" pattern="*ec2*.compute*" isRegEx="false" isBlackList="false" isMultiLine="false" caseSensitive="false" fromSubscription="false" />
<match enabled="true" name="10.*" pattern="http://10.*" isRegEx="false" isBlackList="false" isMultiLine="false" caseSensitive="false" fromSubscription="false" />
<match enabled="true" name="*10*.amazonaws.com*" pattern="*10*.amazonaws.com*" isRegEx="false" isBlackList="false" isMultiLine="false" caseSensitive="false" fromSubscription="false" />
<match enabled="true" name="*10*.compute*" pattern="*10*.compute*" isRegEx="false" isBlackList="false" isMultiLine="false" caseSensitive="false" fromSubscription="false" />
<match enabled="true" name="*localhost*" pattern="*localhost*" isRegEx="false" isBlackList="false" isMultiLine="false" caseSensitive="false" fromSubscription="false" />
</matches>
</proxy>
</proxies>
</foxyproxy>

Once the proxy is enabled you can open the Spark UI by visiting localhost:4040.

Use the right level of parallelism

Clusters will not be fully utilized unless the level of parallelism for each operation is high enough. Spark automatically sets the number of partitions of an input file according to its size and for distributed shuffles, such as groupByKey and reduceByKey, it uses the largest parent RDD’s number of partitions. You can pass the level of parallelism as a second argument to an operation. In general, 2-3 tasks per CPU core in your cluster are recommended. That said, having tasks that are too small is also not advisable as there is some overhead paid to schedule and run a task.

As a rule of thumb tasks should take at least 100 ms to execute; you can ensure that this is the case by monitoring the task execution latency from the Spark UI. If your tasks take considerably longer than that keep increasing the level of parallelism, by say 1.5, until performance stops improving.

Reduce working set size

Sometimes, you will get terrible performance or out of memory errors, because the working set of one of your tasks, such as one of the reduce tasks in groupByKey, was too large. Spark’s shuffle operations (sortByKey, groupByKey, reduceByKey, join, etc) build a hash table within each task to perform the grouping, which can often be large.

Even though those tables spill to disk, getting to the point where the tables need to be spilled increases the memory pressure on the executor incurring the additional overhead of disk I/O and increased garbage collection. If you are using pyspark, the memory pressure will also increase the chance of Python running out of memory.

The simplest fix here is to increase the level of parallelism, so that each task’s input set is smaller.

Avoid groupByKey for associative operations

Both reduceByKey and groupByKey can be used for the same purposes but reduceByKey works much better on a large dataset. That’s because Spark knows it can combine output with a common key on each partition before shuffling the data.

In reduce tasks, key-value pairs are kept in a hash table that can spill to disk, as mentioned in “Reduce working set size“. However, the hash table flushes out the data to disk one key at a time. If a single key has more values than can fit in memory, an out of memory exception occurs. Pre-combining the keys on the mappers before the shuffle operation can drastically reduce the memory pressure and the amount of data shuffled over the network.

Avoid reduceByKey when the input and output value types are different

Consider the job of creating a set of strings for each key:

rdd.map(lambda p: (p[0], {p[1]}))\
.reduceByKey(lambda x, y: x | y)\
.collect()


Note how the input values are strings and the output values are sets. The map operation creates lots of temporary small objects. A better way to handle this scenario is to use aggregateByKey:

def seq_op(xs, x):
return xs

def comb_op(xs, ys):
return xs | ys

rdd.aggregateByKey(set(), seq_op, comb_op).collect()


Avoid the flatMap-join-groupBy pattern

When two datasets are already grouped by key and you want to join them and keep them grouped, you can just use cogroup. That avoids all the overhead associated with unpacking and repacking the groups.

The spark.executor.memory option, which determines the amount of memory to use per executor process, is JVM specific. If you are using pyspark you can’t set that option to be equal to the total amount of memory available to an executor node as the JVM might eventually use all the available memory leaving nothing behind for Python.

Using the broadcast functionality available in SparkContext can greatly reduce the size of each serialized task, and the cost of launching a job over a cluster. If your tasks use any large object from the driver program, like a static lookup table, consider turning it into a broadcast variable.

Cache judiciously

Just because you can cache a RDD in memory doesn’t mean you should blindly do so. Depending on how many times the dataset is accessed and the amount of work involved in doing so, recomputation can be faster than the price paid by the increased memory pressure.

It should go without saying that if you only read a dataset once there is no point in caching it, i it will actually make your job slower. The size of cached datasets can be seen from the Spark UI.

Don’t collect large RDDs

When a collect operation is issued on a RDD, the dataset is copied to the driver, i.e. the master node. A memory exception will be thrown if the dataset is too large to fit in memory; take or takeSample can be used to retrieve only a capped number of elements instead.

Minimize amount of data shuffled

A shuffle is an expensive operation since it involves disk I/O, data serialization, and network I/O. As illustrated in figure 3, each reducer in the second stage has to pull data across the network from all the mappers.

As of Spark 1.3, these files are not cleaned up from Spark’s temporary storage until Spark is stopped, which means that long-running Spark jobs may consume all available disk space. This is done in order to don’t re-compute shuffles.

Know the standard library

Avoid re-implementing existing functionality as it’s guaranteed to be slower.

Use dataframes

A DataFrame is a distributed collection of data organized into named columns. It is conceptually equivalent to a table in a relational database or a pandas Dataframe in Python.

props = get_pings_properties(pings,
["environment/system/os/name",
only_median=True)

frame = sqlContext.createDataFrame(props.map(lambda x: Row(**x)))
frame.groupBy("environment/system/os/name").count().show()


yields:

environment/system/os/name count
Darwin 2368
Linux 2237
Windows_NT 105223


Before any computation on a DataFrame starts, the Catalyst optimizer compiles the operations that were used to build the DataFrame into a physical plan for execution. Since the optimizer generates JVM bytecode for execution, pyspark users will experience the same high performance as Scala users.

# Dashboards made simple with Spark and Plotly

In my previous about our new Spark infrastructure, I went into the details on how to launch a Spark cluster on AWS to perform custom analyses on Telemetry data. Sometimes though one has the need to rerun an analysis recurrently over a certain timeframe, usually to feed data into dashboards of various kinds. We are going to roll out a new feature that allows users to upload an IPython notebook to the self-serve data analysis dashboard and run it on a scheduled basis. The notebook will be executed periodically with the chosen frequency and the result will be made available as an updated IPython notebook.

To schedule a Spark job:

1. Visit the analysis provisioning dashboard at telemetry-dash.mozilla.org and sign in using Persona with an @mozilla.com email address.
2. Click “Schedule a Spark Job”.
3. Enter some details:
• The “Job Name” field should be a short descriptive name, like “chromehangs analysis”.
• Set the number of workers of the cluster in the “Cluster Size” field.
• Set a schedule frequency using the remaining fields.

Once a new scheduled job is created it will appear in the top listing of the scheduling dashboard. When the job is run its result will be made available as an IPython notebook visible by clicking on the “View Data” entry of your job.

As I briefly mentioned at the beginning, periodic jobs are typically used to feed data to dashboards. Writing dashboards for a custom job isn’t very pleasant and I wrote in the past some simple tool to help with that. It turns out though that thanks to IPython one doesn’t need necessarily to write a dashboard from scratch but can simple re-use the notebook as the dashboard itself! I mean, why not? That might not be good enough for management facing dashboards but acceptable for ones aimed at engineers.

In fact with IPython we are not limited at all to matplotlib’s static charts. Thanks to Plotly, it’s easy enough to generate interactive plots which allow to:

• Check the x and y coordinates of every point on the plot by hovering with the cursor.
• Zoom in on the plot and resize lines, points and axes by clicking and dragging the cursor over a region.
• Pan by holding the shift key while clicking and dragging.
• Zooms back out to the original version by double clicking on the plot.

Plotly comes with its own API but if you have already a matplotlib based chart then it’s trivial to convert it to an interactive plot. As a concrete example, I updated my Spark Hello World example with a plotly chart.

fig = plt.figure(figsize=(18, 7))
frame["WINNT"].plot(kind="hist", bins=50)
plt.title("startup distribution for Windows")
plt.ylabel("count")
plt.xlabel("log(firstPaint)")
py.iplot_mpl(fig, strip_style=True)


As you can see, just a single extra line of code is needed for the conversion.

As WordPress doesn’t support iframes, you are going to have to click on the image and follow the link to see the interactive plot in action.

# Next-gen Data Analysis Framework for Telemetry

The easier it is to get answers, the more questions will be asked

In that spirit me and Mark Reid have been working for a while now on a new analysis infrastracture to make it as easy as possible for engineers to get answers to data related questions.

Our shiny new analysis infrastructure is based primarily on IPython and Spark. I blogged about Spark before, I even gave a short tutorial on it at our last workweek in Portland (slides and tutorial); IPython might be something you are not familiar with unless you have a background in science. In a nutshell it’s a browser-based notebook with support for code, text, mathematical expressions, inline plots and other rich media.

The combination of IPython and Spark allows to write data analyses interactively from a browser and seemingly parallelize them over multiple machines thanks to a rich API with over 80 distributed operators! It’s a huge leap forward in terms of productivity compared to traditional batch oriented map-reduce frameworks. An IPython notebook contains both the code and the product of the execution of that code, like plots. Once executed, a notebook can simply be serialized and uploaded to Github. Then, thanks to nbviewer, it can be visualized and shared among colleagues.

In fact, the issue with sharing just the end product of an analysis is that it’s all too easy for bugs to creep in or to make wrong assumptions. If your end result is a plot, how do you test it? How do you know that what you are looking at does actually reflect the truth? Having the code side by side with its evaluation allows more people to  inspect it and streamlines the review process.

This is what you need to do to start your IPython backed Spark cluster with access to Telemetry data:

1. Visit the analysis provisioning dashboard at telemetry-dash.mozilla.org and sign in using Persona with an @mozilla.com email address.
2. Click “Launch an ad-hoc Spark cluster”.
3. Enter some details:
• The “Cluster Name” field should be a short descriptive name, like “chromehangs analysis”.
• Set the number of workers for the cluster. Please keep in mind to use resources sparingly; use a single worker to write and debug your job.
4. Click “Submit”. 
5. A cluster will be launched on AWS preconfigured with Spark, IPython and some handy data analysis libraries like pandas and matplotlib.

Once the cluster is ready, you can tunnel IPython through SSH by following the instructions on the dashboard, e.g.:

ssh -i my-private-key -L 8888:localhost:8888 hadoop@ec2-54-70-129-221.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com


Finally, you can launch IPython in Firefox by visiting http://localhost:8888.

Now what? Glad you asked. In your notebook listing you will see a Hello World notebook. It’s a very simple analysis that produces the distribution of startup times faceted by operating system for a small fraction of Telemetry submissions; let’s quickly review it here.

We start by importing a telemetry utility to fetch pings and some commonly needed libraries for analysis: a json parser, pandas and matplotlib.

import ujson as json
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd
from moztelemetry.spark import get_pings


To execute a block of code in IPython, aka cell, press Shift-Enter. While a cell is being executed, a gray circle will appear in the upper right border of the notebook. When the circle is full, your code is being executed by the IPython kernel; when only the borders of the circle are visible then the kernel is idle and waiting for commands.

Spark exploits parallelism across all cores of your cluster. To see the degree of parallelism you have at your disposal simply yield:


sc.defaultParallelism



Now, let’s fetch a set of telemetry submissions and load it in a RDD using the get_pings utility function from the moztelemetry library:

pings = get_pings(sc,
appName="Firefox",
channel="nightly",
version="*",
buildid="*",
submission_date="20141208",
fraction=0.1)


That’s pretty much self documenting. The fraction parameter, which defaults to 1, selects a random subset of the selected submissions. This comes in handy when you first write your analysis and don’t need to load lots of data to test and debug it.

Note that both the buildid and submission_date parameters accept also a tuple specifying, inclusively, a range of dates, e.g.:


pings = get_pings(sc,
appName="Firefox",
channel="nightly",
version="*",
buildid=("20141201", "20141202"),
submission_date=("20141202", ""20141208"))


Let’s do something with those pings. Since we are interested in the distribution of the startup time of Firefox faceted by operating system, let’s extract the needed fields from our submissions:

def extract(ping):
os = ping["info"]["OS"]
startup = ping["simpleMeasurements"].get("firstPaint", -1)
return (os, startup)

cached = pings.map(lambda ping: extract(ping)).filter(lambda p: p[1] > 0).cache()


As the Python API matches closely the one used from Scala, I suggest to have a look at my older Spark tutorial if you are not familiar with Spark. Another good resource are the hands-on exercises from AMP Camp 4.

Now, let’s collect the results back and stuff it into a pandas DataFrame. This is a very common pattern, once you reduce your dataset to a manageable size with Spark you collect it back on your driver (aka the master machine) and finalize your analysis with statistical tests, plots and whatnot.

grouped = cached.groupByKey().collectAsMap()

frame = pd.DataFrame({x: log(pd.Series(list(y))) for x, y in grouped.items()})
frame.boxplot()
plt.ylabel("log(firstPaint)")
plt.show()



Finally, you can save the notebook, upload it to Github or Bugzilla and visualize it on nbviewer, it’s that simple. Here is the nbviewer powered Hello World notebook. I warmly suggest that you open a bug report on Bugzilla for your custom Telemetry analysis and ask me or Vladan Djeric to review it. Mozilla has been doing code reviews for years and with good reasons, why should data analyses be different?

Congrats, you just completed your first Spark analysis with IPython! If you need any help with your custom job feel free to drop me a line in #telemetry.