This was added in 2018 to help inform the perf survey in case it correlated with negative reports of perceived performance on page views.
Context: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Performance/Essay/Performance_survey_(2019).
The stream was never consumed from Kafka though (we don't use it in navtiming.py, and we don't keep it in Graphite or Prometheus either). This means we're instrumenting in in pageviews via navtiming.js and sending actual beacons to the server, but not using the data.
The beacon is indeed actively being sent by browsers when banners are displayed:
https://grafana.wikimedia.org/d/000000018/eventlogging-schema?orgId=1&var-schema=CentralNoticeTiming
To remove, based on https://codesearch.wmcloud.org/search/?q=CentralNoticeTiming:
- Remove JS beacon dispatch code in mediawiki/extensions/NavigationTiming.git
- Remove enabling of the topic in wmf-config, both from ext-EventLogging and ext-EventStreamConfig in operations/mediawiki-config.git.
- Remove current schema in schemas/event/secondary.git.
- Remove enablement of the topic for legacy eventlogging and refinery in operations/puppet.git.
- Remove enablement of long-term sanitized preservation of the topic in analytics/refinery.git.
- Empty old schema at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schema:CentralNoticeTiming.
- Delete long-term retention Hive table event_sanitized.centralnoticetiming.