Sentry Session Replay

Note: Session Replay is currently in beta. Functionality may change outside of major version bumps - while we try our best to avoid any breaking changes, semver cannot be guaranteed before Replay is out of beta. You can find more information about upgrading in MIGRATION.md.

Pre-requisites

For the sentry-replay integration to work, you must have the Sentry browser SDK package, or an equivalent framework SDK (e.g. @sentry/react) installed. The minimum version required for the SDK is 7.24.0.

Make sure to use the exact same version of @sentry/replay as your other Sentry package(s), e.g. @sentry/browser or @sentry/react.

@sentry/replay requires Node 12+, and browsers newer than IE11.

Installation

Install the Replay package with NPM or your favourite package manager. Alternatively, you can load the Replay integration via a CDN bundle.

with npm:

npm install --save @sentry/browser @sentry/replay

with yarn:

yarn add @sentry/browser @sentry/replay

Setup

To set up the integration, add the following to your Sentry initialization. Several options are supported and passable via the integration constructor. See the configuration section below for more details.

import * as Sentry from '@sentry/browser';
import { Replay } from '@sentry/replay';

Sentry.init({
  dsn: '__DSN__',

  // This sets the sample rate to be 10%. You may want this to be 100% while
  // in development and sample at a lower rate in production
  replaysSessionSampleRate: 0.1,

  // If the entire session is not sampled, use the below sample rate to sample
  // sessions when an error occurs.
  replaysOnErrorSampleRate: 1.0,

  integrations: [
    new Replay({
      // Additional SDK configuration goes in here, for example:
      maskAllText: true,
      blockAllMedia: true
      // See below for all available options
    })
  ],
  // ...
});

Identifying Users

If you have only followed the above instructions to setup session replays, you will only see IP addresses in Sentry's UI. In order to associate a user identity to a session replay, use setUser.

import * as Sentry from "@sentry/browser";
Sentry.setUser({ email: "jane.doe@example.com" });

Start and Stop Recording

Replay recording only starts automatically when it is included in the integrations key when calling Sentry.init. Otherwise you can initialize the plugin and manually call the start() method on the integration instance. To stop recording you can call the stop().

const replay = new Replay(); // This will *NOT* begin recording replays

replay.start(); // Start recording

replay.stop(); // Stop recording

Loading Replay as a CDN Bundle

As an alternative to the NPM package, you can load the Replay integration bundle from our CDN. Note that the Replay bundle only contains the Replay integration and not the entire Sentry SDK. You have to add it in addition to the Sentry Browser SDK bundle:

// Browser SDK bundle
<script
  src="https://browser.sentry-cdn.com/7.24.1/bundle.tracing.min.js"
  crossorigin="anonymous"
></script>

// Replay integration bundle
<script
  src="https://browser.sentry-cdn.com/7.24.1/replay.min.js"
  crossorigin="anonymous"
></script>

// Add Sentry.Integrations.Replay to your Sentry.init call
Sentry.init({
  // This sets the sample rate to be 10%. You may want this to be 100% while
  // in development and sample at a lower rate in production
  replaysSessionSampleRate: 0.1,

  // If the entire session is not sampled, use the below sample rate to sample
  // sessions when an error occurs.
  replaysOnErrorSampleRate: 1.0,

  dsn: '__DSN__',
  integrations: [new Sentry.Integrations.Replay()],
});

The Replay initilialization configuration options are identical to the options of the NPM package.

Please visit our CDN bundle docs to get the correct integrity checksums for your version. Note that the two bundle versions always have to match.

Sessions

A session starts when the Session Replay SDK is first loaded and initialized. The session will continue until 5 minutes passes without any user interactions[^1] with the application OR until a maximum of 30 minutes have elapsed. Closing the browser tab will end the session immediately according to the rules for SessionStorage.

[^1]: An 'interaction' refers to either a mouse click or a browser navigation event.

Replay Captures Only on Errors

Alternatively, rather than recording an entire session, you can capture a replay only when an error occurs. In this case, the integration will buffer up to one minute worth of events prior to the error being thrown. It will continue to record the session following the rules above regarding session life and activity. Read the sampling section for configuration options.

Sampling

Sampling allows you to control how much of your website's traffic will result in a Session Replay. There are two sample rates you can adjust to get the replays more relevant to your interests:

• replaysSessionSampleRate - The sample rate for replays that begin recording immediately and last the entirety of the user's session.
• replaysOnErrorSampleRate - The sample rate for replays that are recorded when an error happens. This type of replay will record up to a minute of events prior to the error and continue recording until the session ends.

Sampling occurs when the session is first started. replaysSessionSampleRate is evaluated first. If it is sampled, then the replay recording begins. Otherwise, replaysOnErrorSampleRate is evaluated and if it is sampled, the integration will begin buffering the replay and will only upload a replay to Sentry when an error occurs. The remainder of the replay will behave similarly to a whole-session replay.

Configuration

SDK Configuration

The following options can be configured on the root level of your browser-based Sentry SDK, in init({}):

General Integration Configuration

The following options can be configured as options to the integration, in new Replay({}):

Privacy Configuration

The following options can be configured as options to the integration, in new Replay({}):

Optimization Configuration

The following options can be configured as options to the integration, in new Replay({}):

rrweb Configuration

In addition to the options described above, you can also directly pass configuration to rrweb, which is the underlying library used to make the recordings:

new Replay({
  // any further configuration here is passed directly to rrweb
});

Privacy

There are several ways to deal with PII. By default, the integration will mask all text content with * and block all media elements (img, svg, video, object, picture, embed, map, audio). This can be disabled by setting maskAllText to false. It is also possible to add the following CSS classes to specific DOM elements to prevent recording its contents: sentry-block, sentry-ignore, and sentry-mask. The following sections will show examples of how content is handled by the differing methods.

Masking

Masking replaces the text content with something else. The default masking behavior is to replace each character with a *. In this example the relevant html code is: <table class="sentry-mask">...</table>.

Blocking

Blocking replaces the element with a placeholder that has the same dimensions. The recording will show an empty space where the content was. In this example the relevant html code is: <table data-sentry-block>...</table>.

Ignoring

Ignoring only applies to form inputs. Events will be ignored on the input element so that the replay does not show what occurs inside of the input. In the below example, notice how the results in the table below the input changes, but no text is visible in the input.

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/79684/192815134-a6451c3f-d3cb-455f-a699-7c3fe04d0a2e.mov

Error Linking

Currently, errors that happen on the page while a replay is running are linked to the Replay, making it as easy as possible to jump between related issues/replays. However, please note that it is possible that the error count reported on the Replay Detail page does not match the actual errors that have been captured. The reason for that is that errors can be lost, e.g. a network request fails, or similar. This should not happen to often, but be aware that it is theoretically possible.