Plugin Power Saver: Add some UMAs to test plugins in wild.

tools/metrics/actions/actions.xml

 <!--
 Copyright 2014 The Chromium Authors. All rights reserved.
 Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style license that can be
 found in the LICENSE file.
 -->
 
 <!--
 This file is a comprehensive list of Chrome user actions along with the owner
 and description for each user action.
 
@@ skipping 2641 matching lines @@
   <description>Please enter the description of this user action.</description>
 </action>
 
 <action name="FirstRunDef_Accept">
   <owner>Please list the metric's owners. Add more owner tags as needed.</owner>
   <description>Please enter the description of this user action.</description>
 </action>
 
 <action name="Flash.PluginInstanceCreated">
   <owner>thestig@chromium.org</owner>
-  <description>Count of frame loads that also load PPAPI Flash.</description>
+  <description>Count of Flash plugin instances.</description>
+</action>
+
+<action name="Flash.PluginInstanceUnthrottledByClick">
+  <owner>thestig@chromium.org</owner>
+  <description>
+    Count of peripheral Flash plugin instances later marked essential by a user
+    click.
+  </description>
+</action>
+
+<action name="Flash.PluginInstanceUnthrottledByWhitelist">
+  <owner>thestig@chromium.org</owner>
+  <description>
+    Count of peripheral Flash plugin instances later marked essential by a
+    retroactive update of the whitelist. These retroactive updates are usually
+    happen at the speed of IPC and look instantaneous.
+  </description>
 </action>

[Ilya Sherman, 2014/11/05 22:36:19]

Are you sure you want to log these as actions rather than as an enumerated
histogram?  What advantage do you see from logging these as actions?  (It might
be the right choice, but I'd like to understand the context so that I can
provide better guidance.)

[tommycli, 2014/11/06 00:36:05]

I thought these might be 'actions' since not every plugin is unthrottled. We
expect that many plugins that get throttled are never unthrottled.

Do we log every single user action / histogram, or do we take a sparse sampling
from our users?

[Ilya Sherman, 2014/11/06 03:30:30]

The idea of building a histogram would be to have a histogram that has one
bucket that records e.g. the number of plugin instances that are created, and to
have two other buckets for recording how many times such plugins were
unthrottled, either by click or by whitelist.  The nice thing about histograms
is that they have context built in to them -- you don't have to guess at which
other actions are meant to be used as baselines.

We do log every single user action and every single histogram (well, for users
who are opted in to sharing metrics, of course).  The main advantages of user
actions are that (a) they have timestamps associated with them, and (b) they
allow easy comparisons to arbitrary other actions.  As a result, actions are
typically used to measure user interactions with Chrome, and especially to gauge
feature usage at a high level.

The main advantages of histograms are that (a) they are more efficient, (b) they
have a built-in baseline, which often makes data analysis much easier, and (c)
they are much better supported on the dashboard side.  Hence, histograms are
typically used when adding metrics that are designed to answer specific
questions like "How often are plugins getting unthrottled?", where you expect
that comparing events recorded in your histogram with events like "How many
times did a user enable Autofill?" is not a useful comparison.

[tommycli, 2014/11/06 21:16:13]

Okay that was very helpful.

I made it a histogram. I added a third possibility of 'Never' to denote plugins
that are throttled but never unthrottled.

With the three options combined, we should be able to get a clear picture of
what happens to ALL plugins after they get throttled.

 
 <action name="FocusAppMenu">
   <owner>Please list the metric's owners. Add more owner tags as needed.</owner>
   <description>Please enter the description of this user action.</description>
 </action>
 
 <action name="FocusBookmarksToolbar">
   <owner>Please list the metric's owners. Add more owner tags as needed.</owner>
   <description>Please enter the description of this user action.</description>
 </action>
@@ skipping 8976 matching lines @@
 <action name="webapps.AddShortcut.Manifest">
   <owner>mlamouri@chromium.org</owner>
   <description>
     Shortcut added to the homescreen with a valid Manifest. This action will be
     recorded in addition to AppShortcut, AppShortcutApple and Bookmark actions
     to keep a trend of whether the webapp also add meta tags.
   </description>
 </action>
 
 </actions>