Performance Issues

A performance issue is a grouping of transaction events that are performing poorly. If your application is configured for tracing, that data can be used in pre-built Sentry Dashboards, Sentry will detect common performance problems, and group them into issues. We group similar transaction events into issues based on a fingerprint. For performance issues, a fingerprint is primarily based on the problem type and the spans involved in the problem.

The Issue Details page helps you to gain further insight into the source of a performance issue and the impact it has on your application's users. The top panel of the page displays high-level information about the issue and an event graph, showing a distribution of events and errors. Use the "Previous Event" and "Next Event" buttons to navigate between the events of an issue. The main area of the page displays information about a specific event that's part of an issue, as well as a breakdown of the tags, span evidence, and breadcrumbs if they are available:

Filter Performance Issues

To filter performance issues in Issues and Dashboards:

• Use issue.category:[db_query,http_client,frontend,mobile] for frontend, HTTP client, database query, and mobile performance issues.
• Use issue.category:metric for function and endpoint regression issues.

How Performance Issues Work

Sentry detects performance issues by scanning incoming transaction events. First we check various properties of the transaction (span durations, span arrangement, span types, and so on) to detect likely problems. We then check these properties against corresponding thresholds to determine whether a performance issue exists. Lastly, we generate a unique problem fingerprint based on the problem type and location in the application, and use that fingerprint to create a performance issue.

Span Evidence

Span evidence is information that explains the performance problem in the context of the current event. It may include details like the specific database queries that cause the problem, the spans that contain the problem, and the slow spans that have an impact on performance. This section also has a span tree which shows how the problematic spans relate to the rest of the event. Different performance problems will have slightly different kinds of evidence.

Event Grouping Information

The "Event Grouping Information" section provides details of how Sentry fingerprinted the event into the group. You can see which parts of the span evidence contributed to the fingerprint.

Configuration

As a Project Admin, you can also manage individual settings for each performance issue detector in Project Settings > Performance. Here, you can raise or lower the thresholds for what Sentry considers a performance issue for each project, or disable detection altogether.

Issue Types

Performance issues can be filtered by the following issue.category values:

Limitations

Performance issues currently have the following limitations:

• Performance issues cannot be merged
• Custom fingerprinting and grouping can't be applied to performance issues