Set Up Tracing

Learn how to enable tracing in your app.

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.

First, configure the sampling 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
import * as Sentry from "@sentry/node";

Sentry.init({
  dsn: "https://examplePublicKey@o0.ingest.sentry.io/0",

  // To set a uniform sample rate
  tracesSampleRate: 0.2

  // Alternatively, to control sampling dynamically
  tracesSampler: samplingContext => { ... }
});

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

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.

If you leave your sample rate at 1.0, a transaction will be sent every time a user loads a page or navigates within your app. Depending on the amount of traffic your application gets, this may mean a lot of transactions. If you have a high-load, backend application, you may want to consider setting a lower tracesSampleRate value, or switching to using tracesSampler to selectively sample and filter your transactions, based on contextual data.

Previous
Data Management
Next
Instrumentation
Help improve this content
Our documentation is open source and available on GitHub. Your contributions are welcome, whether fixing a typo (drat!) or suggesting an update ("yeah, this would be better").