Users

Users consist of a few critical pieces of information that construct a unique identity in Sentry. Each of these is optional, but one must be present for the Sentry SDK to capture the user:

Your internal identifier for the user.

The username. Typically used as a better label than the internal id.

An alternative, or addition, to the username. Sentry is aware of email addresses and can display things such as Gravatars and unlock messaging capabilities.

The user's IP address. If the user is unauthenticated, Sentry uses the IP address as a unique identifier for the user. Serverside SDKs that instrument incoming requests will attempt to pull the IP address from the HTTP request data (request.env.REMOTE_ADDR field in JSON), if available. That might require sendDefaultPii set to true in the SDK options.

If the user's ip_address is set to "{{auto}}", Sentry will infer the IP address from the connection between your app and Sentry's server.

If the field is omitted, the default value is null. However, due to backwards compatibility concerns, certain platforms (in particular JavaScript) have a different default value for "{{auto}}". SDKs and other clients should not rely on this behavior and should set IP addresses or "{{auto}}" explicitly.

To opt out of storing users' IP addresses in your event data, you can go to your project settings, click on "Security & Privacy", and enable "Prevent Storing of IP Addresses" or use Sentry's server-side data scrubbing to remove $user.ip_address. Adding such a rule ultimately overrules any other logic.

Additionally, you can provide arbitrary key/value pairs beyond the reserved names, and the Sentry SDK will store those with the user.

To identify the user:

Copied
import io.sentry.Sentry;
import io.sentry.protocol.User;

User user = new User();
user.setEmail("jane.doe@example.com");
Sentry.setUser(user);

You can also clear the currently set user:

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import io.sentry.Sentry;

Sentry.configureScope(scope -> {
  scope.setUser(null);
});
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