Nowadays, we have Super Search, a flexible interface to our data, that allows users to do a lot of those specific things they need. As it is highly configurable, it's easy to keep the pace of new additions to the crash reports and to evolve the capabilities of this tool. Couple that with our public API and we can say that our users have pretty good tools to solve most of their problems. If Super Search's UI is not good enough, they can write a script that they run locally, hitting our API, and they can do pretty much anything we can do.
But that still has problems. Local scripts are not ideal: it's inconvenient to share them or to expose their results, it's hard to work on them collaboratively, it requires working on some rendering and querying the API where one could just focus on processing the data, and it doesn't integrate with our Web site. I think we can do better. And to demonstrate that, I built a prototype. Introducing...
Spectateur
Spectateur is a service that takes care of querying the API and rendering the data for you. All you need to do is work on the data, make it what you want it to be, and share your custom report with the rest of the world. It uses a language commonly known, JavaScript, so that most people (at least at Mozilla) can understand and hack what you have done. It lets you easily save your report and gives you a URL to bookmark and to share. And that's about it, because it's just a prototype, but it's still pretty cool, isn't it?
To explain it a little more: Spectateur contains three parts. The Model lets you choose what data you want. It uses Super Search and gives you about the same capabilities that Socorro's UI has. Once you have set your filters and chosen the aggregations you need, we move to the Controller. That's a simple JavaScript editor (using Ace) and you can type almost anything in there. Just keep the function transform, the callback and the last lines that set the interface, otherwise it won't work at all. There are also some limitations for security: the code is executed in a Web Worker in an iframe, so you have no access to the main page's scope. Network requests are blocked, among other things. I'm using a wonderful library called jailed, if you want to know more, please read its documentation.
Once you are done writing your controller, and you have exposed your data, you can click the Run button to create the View. It will fetch the data, run your processor on that data and then render the results following the rules you have exposed. The data can currently be displayed as a table (using jsGrid) or as a chart (using Chart.js). For details, please read the documentation of Spectateur (there's a link at the top). When you are satisfied with your custom report, click the button Save. That will save the Model and the Controller and give you a URL (by updating the URL bar). Come back to that URL to reload your report. Note that if you make a change to your report and click Save again, a new URL will be generated, the previous report won't be overwritten.
As an example, here is a report that shows, for our B2G product, a graph of the top versions, a chart of the top signatures and a list of crash reports, all of that based on data from the last 7 days: https://spectateur.mozilla.io/#58a036ec-c5bf-469a-9b23-d0431b67f436
I hope this tool will be useful to our users. As usual, if you have comments, feedback, criticisms, if you feel this is a waste of time and we should not invest any more time in it, or on the contrary you think this is what you needed this whole time, please please please let us know!