Connect Services

When

is enabled, the SDK will attach an outgoing header called sentry-trace to requests. This depends on the out of the box integrations we provide, but you can expect the header sentry-trace to be present. If it's not, you can manually add sentry-trace headers to any requests by learning more about its structure.

SDKs with performance monitoring support listen to incoming requests and typically automatically pick up the incoming sentry-trace header to continue the trace (with the same trace-id) from there, connecting backend and frontend transactions into a single coherent trace using the trace_id value. Depending on the circumstance, this ID is transmitted either in a request header or in an HTML <meta> tag.

All your transactions that have the same trace-id are connected. Linking transactions in this way makes it possible to navigate among them in sentry.io to better understand how the different parts of your system are affecting one another. You can learn more about this model in our Distributed Tracing docs.

If the instrumentation you're using doesn't automatically pick up the sentry-trace header, you can also continue a trace manually by using the continueFromHeaders function on a Transaction. Learn more about this in our Transaction Interface documentation.

HTTP and GraphQL Requests

For traces that begin in the mobile app, any requests made (and any requests your backend makes as a result) are linked through the request header sentry-trace.

The Sentry Android SDK offers OkHttp and Apollo integrations for HTTP and GraphQL requests respectively.

These integrations either generate or pick up and propagate the trace header automatically, as appropriate, for all transactions and spans that they generate.