Performance Monitoring

Performance Monitoring helps you see everything from macro-level metrics to micro-level spans, and you’ll be able to cross-reference transactions with related issues, customize queries based on your personal needs, and substantially more and is avaliable for the Sentry Python SDK version ≥ 0.11.2.

Automatic Instrumentation

Many integrations for popular frameworks automatically capture transactions. If you already have any of the following frameworks set up for Sentry error reporting, you will start to see traces immediately:

• All WSGI-based web frameworks (Django, Flask, Pyramid, Falcon, Bottle)
• Celery
• AIOHTTP web apps
• Redis Queue (RQ)

Spans are instrumented for the following operations within a transaction:

• Database queries that use SQLAlchemy or the Django ORM
• HTTP requests made with requests or the stdlib
• Spawned subprocesses
• Redis operations

If you want to automatically enable all relevant transactions, you can use this alternative configuration (currently in alpha):

import sentry_sdk

sentry_sdk.init(
    "https://examplePublicKey@o0.ingest.sentry.io/0",
    _experiments={"auto_enabling_integrations": True}
)

Manual Instrumentation

To manually instrument certain regions of your code, you can create a transaction to capture them.

The following example creates a transaction for a scope that contains an expensive operation (for example, process_item), and sends the result to Sentry:

from sentry_sdk import start_transaction

while True:
  item = get_from_queue()

  with start_transaction(op="task", name=item.get_transaction_name()):
      # process_item may create more spans internally (see next examples)
      process_item(item)

Adding More Spans to the Transaction

The next example contains the implementation of the hypothetical process_item function called from the code snippet in the previous section. Our SDK can determine if there is currently an open transaction and add all newly created spans as child operations to that transaction. Keep in mind that each individual span also needs to be manually finished; otherwise, spans will not show up in the transaction. When using spans and transactions as context managers, they are automatically finished at the end of the with block.

In cases where you want to attach Spans to an already ongoing Transaction you can use Hub.current.scope.transaction. This property will return a Transaction in case there is a running Transaction otherwise it returns None.

Alternatively, instead of adding to the top-level transaction, you can make a child span of the current span, if there is one. Use Hub.current.scope.span in that case.

You can choose the value of op and description.

from sentry_sdk import Hub

def process_item(item):
    transaction = Hub.current.scope.transaction
    # omitted code...
    with transaction.start_child(op="http", description="GET /") as span:
        response = my_custom_http_library.request("GET", "/")
        span.set_tag("http.status_code", response.status_code)
        span.set_data("http.foobarsessionid", get_foobar_sessionid())

The alternative to make a tree of spans:

from sentry_sdk import Hub

def process_item(item):
    parent_span = Hub.current.scope.span
    # omitted code...
    with parent_span.start_child(op="http", description="GET /") as span:
        response = my_custom_http_library.request("GET", "/")
        span.set_tag("http.status_code", response.status_code)
        span.set_data("http.foobarsessionid", get_foobar_sessionid())

Retrieving a Transaction

In cases where you want to attach Spans to an already ongoing Transaction you can use Hub.current.scope.transaction. This property will return a Transaction in case there is a running Transaction otherwise it returns None.

from sentry_sdk import Hub

transaction = Hub.current.scope.transaction

if transaction is None:
    with start_transaction(name="task"):
        do_task()
else:
    transaction.name = "new name"
    with transaction.start_child(op="task"):
        do_task()

Retrieving the Current Span

Started spans are stored in the scope, and can be fetched off the scope:

from sentry_sdk import Hub

span = Hub.current.scope.span

if span is None:
    # no span in progress, create new transaction
    with start_transaction(name="task"):
        do_task()
else:
    # new task span as child of current span
    with span.start_child(op="task"):
        do_task()

Adding Query Information and Parameters to Spans

Currently, every tag has a maximum character limit of 200 characters. Tags over the 200 character limit will become truncated, losing potentially important information. To retain this data, you can split data over several tags instead.

For example, a 200+ character tagged request:

https://empowerplant.io/api/0/projects/ep/setup_form/?user_id=314159265358979323846264338327&tracking_id=EasyAsABC123OrSimpleAsDoReMi&product_name=PlantToHumanTranslator&product_id=161803398874989484820458683436563811772030917980576

The 200+ character request above will become truncated to:

https://empowerplant.io/api/0/projects/ep/setup_form/?user_id=314159265358979323846264338327&tracking_id=EasyAsABC123OrSimpleAsDoReMi&product_name=PlantToHumanTranslator&product_id=1618033988749894848

Instead, using span.set_tag and span.set_data preserves the details of this query using structured metadata. This could be done over base_url, endpoint, and parameters:

import sentry_sdk

# ...

base_url = "https://empowerplant.io"
endpoint = "/api/0/projects/ep/setup_form"
parameters = {
    "user_id": 314159265358979323846264338327,
    "tracking_id": "EasyAsABC123OrSimpleAsDoReMi",
    "product_name": PlantToHumanTranslator,
    "product_id": 161803398874989484820458683436563811772030917980576,
}

with sentry_sdk.start_span(op="request", transaction="setup form") as span:
    span.set_tag("base_url", base_url)
    span.set_tag("endpoint", endpoint)
    span.set_data("parameters", parameters)
    make_request(
        "{base_url}/{endpoint}/".format(
            base_url=base_url,
            endpoint=endpoint,
        ),
        data=parameters
    )

    # ...