Sprints/Plasma/2025/Topics/Telemetry
Problems with the status quo
- No way to change what we ask for without technical changes
- Viewer UI is restricted so no data is publicly available, and it requires writing scary SQL to use
Actionable ideas
- In the interim, massively increase the data collection interval for Plasma, which is super frequent right now
- We have functionality for surveys; we could leverage this to make something like the Steam hardware survey and then just do that
- Generate a static site with the latest data, and then aggregated data (but not raw data) can be public
- Don't go with Privact right now since it needs more proving out in production first
Follow up testing with Apache Superset
- Installation with docker was relatively trivial
- It's very easy to make new graphs. I recreated all of plasma's dashboard in about an hour.
- It supports a concept of "virtual databases" (Like a "view" in SQL) so any complex parts like filtering the latest result only have to be done once
- We can set up pre-defined "filters" that apply to the current dashboard (i.e if we have a graph of screen resolutions) you can then filter by "only on Wayland" and "only on 6.3" that viewers can use without us needing to make more graphs ahead of time.
- Similarly there's "cross-filtering" between graphs which is basically the same idea.
- It supports OAuth, but the docs for setting this up are not great
- It allows different roles for viewing uneditable dashboards vs viewing everything else.
Negatives:
- Still had to write custom SQL for handling the separate table for screen resolutions, but at least only once.
- On the dashboard you can access raw data (maybe it's possible to lock it down?)