Ask A BotTrace View
The trace view is designed to be your one-stop-shop when debugging performance or errors. It gives you full context on what was happening when an error or performance issue occurred, all in one place. The waterfall trace view allows you to see everything that may have occurred during a trace, including errors, performance issues, and any profiles that may have been collected.
In addition, the trace view allows you to drill down into the details of a single trace so you can visualize the high-level transactions and spans that took place within that trace. This makes debugging slow services, identifying related errors, and rooting out bottlenecks easier and faster, since you no longer have to navigate around multiple pages of the Sentry product.
Sentry's default visualization of a trace is a waterfall-like structure, where the entries (transactions and spans) in the list are organized chronologically and through ancestry (child spans will fall under their parents). This allows you to follow the order of operations and drill into sub-operations.
On the left side is a list of operations, and on the right is their duration and any events, such as errors, which may have occurred in that timeframe.
By default, the waterfall view shows a list of transactions. If you need more granular data and want to see spans as well, click "+" to the left of a transaction to expand the waterfall. The waterfall view helps surface any performance issues or profiles collected during a given timeframe.
Because debugging often involves multiple people or teams, we've made it easy to draw attention to specific areas of the trace and share a link that shows what you've highlighted with your colleagues. To do this, click on the row you'd like to draw attention to and share the resulting URL. Your colleague will see exactly what you want them to.
Whatever you highlight will also be saved if you navigate away from the page and will still be there when you use your browser's back and forward buttons.
If you're doing a comparison and want an easy way to go back and forth between highlighted areas of interest in your trace, you can pin the tabs. When a tab is pinned, the view will be persistent throughout your session.
Sometimes, duration gaps between entries can be small, but critical to your debugging effort. That's why the trace view enables you to zoom into certain areas of the trace, either by double clicking on row elements (which zooms into the row) or by using your scroll wheel.
The trace view has other features like search, which makes it easy to visualize matching spans that you can then iterate over using the up or down arrows. You can also tailor the layout to your preference.
We're going to continue adding features that enable you to perform efficient investigation into whatever issues you might be facing. If you have feedback or requests, please share it with us. We'd love to hear how we can make your life easier and your users happier.
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").