Automatic Instrumentation

Learn what transactions are captured after tracing is enabled.

@sentry/react-native provides automatic performance instrumentation out of the box when tracing is enabled.

To make the most out of our automatic instrumentation, you should:

Wrap your root component with Sentry to access the most Performance features.

App.js
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export default Sentry.wrap(App);

When no routing instrumentation is used, a transaction for App Start is automatically captured. However, that transaction stops being sent when one of the routing integrations below is added. Instead, the App Start information is included as a span in a transaction captured by the routing instrumentation.

We currently provide three routing instrumentations out of the box to instrument route changes for:

If you have a custom routing instrumentation or use a routing library we don't yet support, you can use the bare bones routing instrumentation or create your own by extending it.

Sentry offers the following automatic instrumentation features.

The App Start Instrumentation provides insight into how long your application takes to launch. It tracks the length of time from the earliest native process initialization until the React Native root component mounts.

If you don't wrap your root component with Sentry, the App Start measurement will finish when the JavaScript code is initialized instead of when the first component mount.

The SDK differentiates between a cold and a warm start, but doesn't track hot starts or resumes. The measurements are available under measurements.app_start_warm and measurements.app_start_cold.

For SDKs from version 4.4.0 to 5.0.0 the app start measurements are available under measurements.app.start.warm and measurements.app.start.cold as custom measurements.

Cold and warm start are Mobile Vitals, which you can learn about in the full documentation.

Unresponsive UI and animation hitches annoy users and degrade the user experience. Two measurements to track these types of experiences are slow frames and frozen frames. If you want your app to run smoothly, you should try to avoid both. The SDK adds these two measurements for the transactions you capture.

Slow and frozen frames are Mobile Vitals, which you can learn about in the full documentation.

React Native mobile apps will not report Web Vitals. These values depend on APIs provided by browsers, and are not available in this context.

Sentry uses the androidx.core library for detecting slow and frozen frames. This is necessary to produce accurate results across all Android OS versions.

We check for availability at runtime, so if you're not using androidx.core, you can remove it from Sentry's transitive dependencies.

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api ('io.sentry:sentry-android:7.9.0') {
    exclude group: 'androidx.core', module: 'core'
}

Note that if you remove this transitive dependency, slow and frozen frames won't be reported.

A stall is when the JavaScript event loop takes longer than expected to complete. A stall in your JavaScript code will not just make your UI unresponsive, but also slow down the logic that is contained within JavaScript. This slows everything down, creating a bad experience for your users.

We track stalls that occur in your React Native app during a transaction and provide you with these values:

  • Longest Stall Time: The time, in milliseconds, of the longest event loop stall.
  • Total Stall Time: The total combined time, in milliseconds, of all stalls.
  • Stall Count: The total number of stalls that occurred during the transaction.

The tracing integration creates a child span for every XMLHttpRequest or fetch request on the Javascript layer that occurs while those transactions are open. Learn more about traces, transactions, and spans.

To configure the automatic performance instrumentation, you will need to add the ReactNativeTracing integration yourself. We provide many options by default, so for the majority of apps you won't need to configure the integration yourself.

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import * as Sentry from '@sentry/react-native';

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

  integrations: [new Sentry.ReactNativeTracing()],
});

For all possible options, see ReactNativeTracingOptions.

You can use beforeNavigate to modify the transaction from routing instrumentation before the transaction is created. If you prefer not to send the transaction, set sampled = false.

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Sentry.init({
  dsn: 'https://examplePublicKey@o0.ingest.sentry.io/0',
  integrations: [
    new Sentry.ReactNativeTracing({
      routingInstrumentation,
      beforeNavigate: context => {
        // Decide to not send a transaction by setting sampled = false
        if (context.data.route.name === 'Do Not Send') {
          context.sampled = false;
        }

        // Modify the transaction context
        context.name = context.name.toUpperCase();
        context.tags = {
          ...context.tags,
          customTag: 'value',
        };

        return context;
      },
    }),
  ],
});

If you use our routing instrumentation for React Navigation, the route data is set on the transaction context passed to beforeNavigate. This has the type:

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type ReactNavigationTransactionContext = {
  // ...
  data: {
    route: {
      name: string;
      key: string;
      params: {
        [key: string]: any;
      };
      /** Will be true if this is not the first time this screen with this key has been seen before. */
      hasBeenSeen: boolean;
    };
    previousRoute: {
      name: string;
      key: string;
      params: {
        [key: string]: any;
      };
    } | null;
  };
};

If you use Typescript, you can type your beforeNavigate function with Sentry.ReactNavigationTransactionContext.

The default value of tracePropagationTargets is ['localhost', /^\//]. The React Native SDK will attach the sentry-trace header to all outgoing XHR/fetch requests whose destination contains a string in the list or matches a regex in the list. If your frontend is making requests to a different domain, you will need to add the domain there to propagate the sentry-trace header to the backend services, which is required to link transactions together as part of a single trace. The tracePropagationTargets option matches against the entire request URL, not just the domain. Using stricter regex to match certain parts of the URL ensures that requests do not unnecessarily have the sentry-trace header attached.

For example:

  • A frontend application is served from example.com
  • A backend service is served from api.example.com
  • The frontend application makes API calls to the backend
  • Therefore, the option needs to be configured like this: new Sentry.ReactNativeTracing({tracePropagationTargets: ['api.example.com']})
  • Now outgoing XHR/fetch requests to api.example.com will get the sentry-trace header attached
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Sentry.init({
  dsn: 'https://examplePublicKey@o0.ingest.sentry.io/0',
  integrations: [
    new Sentry.ReactNativeTracing({
      tracePropagationTargets: ['localhost', 'my-site-url.com'],
    }),
  ],

  // We recommend adjusting this value in production, or using tracesSampler
  // for finer control
  tracesSampleRate: 1.0,
});

You will need to configure your web server CORS to allow the sentry-trace header. The configuration might look like "Access-Control-Allow-Headers: sentry-trace", but the configuration depends on your setup. If you do not allow the sentry-trace header, the request might be blocked.

This function can be used to filter out unwanted spans, such as XHR's running health checks or something similar. By default, shouldCreateSpanForRequest already filters out everything except what was defined in tracePropagationTargets.

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Sentry.init({
  // ...
  integrations: [
    new Sentry.ReactNativeTracing({
      shouldCreateSpanForRequest: url => {
        // Do not create spans for outgoing requests to a `/health/` endpoint
        return !url.match(/\/health\/?$/);
      },
    }),
  ],
});

The maximum duration of a transaction, measured in seconds, before it will be marked as "deadline_exceeded". If you never want transactions marked that way, set maxTransactionDuration to 0.

The default is 600.

Currently, by default, the React Native SDK will only create child spans for fetch/XHR transactions out of the box. This means once you are done setting up your routing instrumentation, you will either see just a few fetch/XHR child spans or no children at all. To find out how to customize instrumentation your app, review our Custom Instrumentation.

We export the React Profiler from our React Native SDK as well. Learn more in React Component Tracking.

After you instrument your app's routing, if you wrap a component that renders on one of the routes with withProfiler, you will be able to track the component's lifecycle as a child span of the route transaction.

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import * as Sentry from '@sentry/react-native';

// withProfiler HOC
const SomeComponent = () => {
  // ...
};

export default Sentry.withProfiler(SomeComponent);

When bundling for production, React Native will minify class and function names to reduce the bundle size. This means that you won't get the full original component names in your Profiler spans and instead you will see minified names. Check out our troubleshooting guide for minified production bundles documentation to solve this.

If you want to use tracing without our automatic instrumentation, you can disable it by setting enableAutoPerformanceTracing in your Sentry options and removing the ReactNativeTracing integration, if you added it:

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import * as Sentry from '@sentry/react-native';

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

  enableAutoPerformanceTracing: false,
});

The UI instrumentation captures transactions and adds breadcrumbs for touch interactions. Gesture support using React Native Gesture Handler is also available with the sentryTraceGesture wrapper. Learn more about User Interaction Instrumentation.

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