Set Up Tracing

Learn how to enable tracing in your app and discover valuable performance insights of your application.

With tracing, Sentry tracks your software performance, measuring metrics like throughput and latency, and displaying the impact of errors across multiple systems. Sentry captures distributed traces consisting of transactions and spans, which measure individual services and individual operations within those services. Learn more about our model in Distributed Tracing.

If you’re adopting Tracing in a high-throughput environment, we recommend testing prior to deployment to ensure that your service’s performance characteristics maintain expectations.

  • Tracing is available for the Sentry's Go SDK version ≥ 0.9.0.

First, enable tracing and configure the sample rate for transactions. Set the sample rate for your transactions by either:

  • Setting a uniform sample rate for all transactions using the TracesSampleRate option in your SDK config to a number between 0 and 1. (For example, to send 20% of transactions, set TracesSampleRate to 0.2.)
  • Controlling the sample rate based on the transaction itself and the context in which it's captured, by providing a function to the TracesSampler config option.

The two options are meant to be mutually exclusive. If you set both, TracesSampler will take precedence.

Copied
func main() {
    err := sentry.Init(sentry.ClientOptions{
        // ...

+       EnableTracing: true,

+       // Specify a fixed sample rate:
+       // We recommend adjusting this value in production
+       TracesSampleRate: 1.0,

+       // Or provide a custom sample rate:
+       TracesSampler: sentry.TracesSampler(func(ctx sentry.SamplingContext) float64 {
+           // As an example, this does not send some
+           // transactions to Sentry based on their name.
+           if ctx.Span.Name == "GET /health" {
+               return 0.0
+           }
+           return 1.0
+       }),
    })
}

Learn more about tracing options, how to use the TracesSampler function, or how to sample transactions.

Test out tracing by starting and finishing a transaction, which you must do so transactions can be sent to Sentry. Learn how in our Custom Instrumentation content.

While you're testing, set TracesSampleRate to 1.0, as that ensures that every transaction will be sent to Sentry. Once testing is complete, you may want to set a lower TracesSampleRate value, or switch to using TracesSampler to selectively sample and filter your transactions, based on contextual data.

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