sentry-setup-tracing

Enable performance tracing in Sentry by setting tracesSampleRate in your SDK initialization to capture a percentage of transactions, then instrument your application with spans to measure specific operations. This gives you visibility into end-to-end latency and bottlenecks across your services.

Transactions represent root-level operations like HTTP requests or page loads, while spans are nested child operations within transactions that measure specific tasks. Together they create a hierarchical trace showing where time is spent across your application.

Yes. Sentry tracing supports JavaScript/TypeScript (Next.js, Node.js, React, Vue, Angular, SvelteKit), Python, and Ruby with platform-specific setup. Trace propagation connects transactions across services so you see the complete request path through your distributed system.

Set tracesSampleRate as a decimal between 0 and 1 to control what percentage of transactions Sentry captures. Start with a lower rate in production to manage volume, or use tracesSampler for dynamic sampling based on transaction context like URL or user tier.

Initialize the Sentry SDK with tracing enabled, set tracesSampleRate or tracesSampler, and integrate framework-specific instrumentation for your platform (browser, Next.js, Node.js, etc.). Sentry automatically instruments common operations; verify traces appear in your Sentry dashboard.

Distributed tracing connects transactions across your frontend, backend, and microservices to show you the complete request flow and identify where performance degrades. This reduces guesswork in performance tuning and helps pinpoint bottlenecks that span multiple systems.