fix(@angular-devkit/core): add Angular CLI major version as analytics dimension

[alan-agius4]

With this change we replace the custom dimension 8 AOT Enabled, with Angular CLI Major Version. The motivation behind replacing this dimension is that the there is already an aot dimension with id 13 which serves for the same purpose.

More information to why we need a new dimension for the Angular CLI major version can be found #22130

Closes #22130

[IgorMinar]

Can we not reuse this dimension and instead create a new one or use browser version as suggested? The reason being that the dimension is already used for other purposes which then results in queries that span long time periods into the past to return garbage or unbelievable results. Thanks

[alan-agius4]

@IgorMinar, so both dimension 8 and 13 are used in the reports to determine if a build is AOT or not?

We cannot add an additional dimension because we are already using the maximum allowed which is 20. With regards of using the Browser Version, this is currently used to track which OS is being used by building a fake UA string, I think in the past we found to be useful. Also this is not a custom dimension and I need to verify if GA API has some validations for this field. (Did try to look it up in the docs but got lost 😞)

PS: as a separate exercise we should probably visit some dimensions as I believe some of them don’t provide that much value.

[alan-agius4]

From the GA docs https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/parameters#ua

The User Agent of the browser. Note that Google has libraries to identify real user agents. Hand crafting your own agent could break at any time.

[alan-agius4]

@IgorMinar, maybe we can use aid (app Id) or aiid (app installer Id)? The latter is currently not used.

We also are tracking node.js version via aid and a custom dimension

angular-cli/packages/angular/cli/models/analytics-collector.ts

Line 106 in fccaa3e

this.parameters['aid'] = nodeVersion;

angular-cli/packages/angular/cli/models/analytics.ts

Line 287 in 8824b4c

this._dimensions[analytics.NgCliAnalyticsDimensions.NodeVersion] = _getNumericNodeVersion();

[IgorMinar]

@IgorMinar, maybe we can use aid (app Id) or aiid (app installer Id)? The latter is currently not used.

Maybe that would work, but @mgechev asked me about analytics 360 which would give us more dimensions. Let's explore if we can get on that plan and resolve this without hacks. We could use additional dimensions for future metrics anyway.

[alan-agius4]

Yeah I brought that up with Minko, yesterday. That would allow us to have 200 dimensions and 200 metrics. On the free version we only 20.

Got this info from: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2709828?hl=en#Limits&zippy=%2Cin-this-article

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