AppSignal Elixir configuration options

The following list includes all configuration options with the name of the environment variable and the name of the key in the configuration file.

For more information on how to configure AppSignal with a configuration file or system environment variables, see our Configuration topic.

Available options

• Required options
  • active
  • env
  • name
  • otp_app
  • push_api_key
• Options
  • bind_address
  • ca_file_path
  • cpu_count
  • debug
  • dns_servers
  • ecto_repos
  • enable_error_backend
  • enable_host_metrics
  • enable_minutely_probes
  • enable_nginx_metrics
  • enable_statsd
  • endpoint
  • files_world_accessible
  • filter_parameters
  • filter_session_data
  • host_role
  • hostname
  • http_proxy
  • ignore_actions
  • ignore_errors
  • ignore_logs
  • ignore_namespaces
  • instrument_absinthe
  • instrument_ecto
  • instrument_finch
  • instrument_oban
  • instrument_tesla
  • log
  • log_level
  • log_path
  • report_oban_errors
  • request_headers
  • revision
  • running_in_container
  • send_environment_metadata
  • send_params
  • send_session_data
  • skip_session_data
  • statsd_port
  • transaction_debug_mode
  • working_dir_path
  • working_directory_path

active

Description

Configure AppSignal to be active or not for a given environment. Most commonly used in the file configuration per environment.

env

Description

The environment of the app to be reported to AppSignal. This option is set by default by our installer, to Mix.env. To override it, change the value in config/appsignal.exs (or your config file of choice).

# config/appsignal.exs
# or config/config.exs
config :appsignal, :config,
  env: Mix.env # Installer default
 
# Set your own value
config :appsignal, :config,
  env: :staging

To override the config option in the system environment, use the APPSIGNAL_APP_ENV environment variable.

# The method of setting environment variables may differ on your system
export APPSIGNAL_APP_ENV=staging
mix run

The environment variable option is commonly used on platforms, such as Heroku, where apps run in the production environment by default. This setting allows an override to set the environment to staging, for example.

heroku config:set APPSIGNAL_APP_ENV=staging

name

Description

Name of your application as it should be displayed on AppSignal.com.

otp_app

Description

The OTP app name of your application, to be used for automatic configuration of instrumentation for libraries like Ecto.

push_api_key

Description

The organization-level authentication key to authenticate with our Push API.

Read more about the AppSignal Push API key.

bind_address

Description

A valid IPv4 address the AppSignal agent uses as a binding for its TCP and UDP servers. Use a specific address if you only want the agent to listen to requests made to that address. Set this option to 0.0.0.0 to allow to receive requests from hosts using any IP address. By default it only listens to requests made on the same host. This option is applied to all the agent servers (StatsD, OpenTelemetry and NGINX).

ca_file_path

Description

Configure the path of the SSL certificate file. By default this points to the AppSignal vendored cacert.pem file in the package itself.

Use this option to point to another certificate file if there's a problem connecting to our API.

cpu_count

Description

The available CPU capacity of the host, in number of CPUs. This is used to calculate the CPU usage percentage in the host metrics. If not set, the agent will attempt to automatically detect this from cgroups.

The number of CPUs can be a fraction, e.g. 0.5.

debug

Description

Enable debug logging, this is usually only needed on request from support. With this option enabled AppSignal will log a lot more information about decisions that are made during metrics collection and when data is sent to AppSignal.com servers.

Enabling debug logging could have a slight impact on the disk usage and IO, especially on high-traffic sites. CPU overhead is minimal with the debug option enabled.

dns_servers

Description

Configure DNS servers for the AppSignal agent to use.

# config/config.exs
config :appsignal, :config,
  dns_servers: ["8.8.8.8", "8.8.4.4"]

# In the host environment
export APPSIGNAL_DNS_SERVERS="8.8.8.8,8.8.4.4"

If you're affected by our DNS timeouts, try setting a DNS server manually using this option that doesn't use more than 4 dots in the server name.

• Acceptable values: 8.8.8.8, my.custom.local.server.
• Not acceptable values: foo, my.awesome.custom.local.dns.server.

If the DNS server cannot be reached the agent will fall back on the host's DNS configuration and output a message in the appsignal.log file: A problem occurred while setting DNS servers.

ecto_repos

Description

Configure which Ecto repos to instrument queries for. If unset, AppSignal will automatically find your repos through your application configuration.

# config/config.exs
config :appsignal, :config,
  ecto_repos: [AppsignalPhoenixExample.Repo, AppsignalPhoenixExample.AnotherRepo]

# In the host environment
export APPSIGNAL_ECTO_REPOS="AppsignalPhoenixExample.Repo,AppsignalPhoenixExample.AnotherRepo"

enable_error_backend

Description

Enables the error backend in the Elixir integration.

enable_host_metrics

Description

Set this option to false to disable host metrics collection.

On Heroku and Dokku host metrics are disabled by default. This is done because these systems will report inaccurate metrics from within the containers. Host metrics collection on these systems cannot be enabled. For Heroku, use the Heroku log drain instead.

enable_minutely_probes

Description

Enables the minutely probes system.

enable_nginx_metrics

Description

Set to true to enable the NGINX metrics server. See the NGINX metrics documentation for details.

When enabled, the AppSignal agent will listen to a localhost-bound server on port 27649. If you're running several AppSignal-instrumented applications in the same server, this configuration option can only be enabled in one of them.

enable_statsd

Description

Enables the StatsD server in the AppSignal agent.

When enabled, the AppSignal agent will listen to a localhost-bound server on port 8125. If you're running several AppSignal-instrumented applications in the same server, this configuration option can only be enabled in one of them.

endpoint

Description

Configure the endpoint to send data to AppSignal. This setting will not have to be changed.

files_world_accessible

Description

If this is set to true the AppSignal working directory that is created is accessible for all users (Unix permissions 0666). This is often necessary because processes for the same app run under a different user. Set to false to disable this behaviour (Unix permissions 0644).

filter_parameters

Description

List of parameter keys that should be ignored using AppSignal filtering. Their values will be replaced with [FILTERED] when transmitted to AppSignal. You can configure this with a list of keys in the configuration file.

# config/appsignal.exs
config :appsignal, :config,
  filter_parameters: ["password", "secret"]

Read more about parameter filtering.

filter_session_data

Description

List of session data keys that should be ignored using AppSignal filtering. Their values will be replaced with [FILTERED] when transmitted to AppSignal. You can configure this with a list of keys in the configuration file.

# config/appsignal.exs
config :appsignal, :config,
  filter_session_data: ["name", "email", "api_token", "token"]

Read more about session data filtering.

host_role

Description

Group hosts by role and generate metrics based on this role. One such metric is the reporting_hosts counter metric. A good role indicates what the main role of the server is, like "webserver", "processor", "api", "database", "loadbalancer", etc.

hostname

Description

This overrides the server's hostname. Useful for when you're unable to set a custom hostname or when a nondescript id is generated for you on hosting services.

http_proxy

Description

If you require the agent to connect to the Internet via a proxy set the complete proxy URL in this configuration key.

ignore_actions

Description

With this config option you can specify a list of actions that will be ignored by AppSignal. Everything that happens including exceptions will not be transmitted to AppSignal. This can be useful to ignore health check endpoints or other actions that you don't want to monitor.

Read more about ignoring actions.

ignore_errors

Description

List of error classes that will be ignored. Any exception raised with this error class will not be transmitted to AppSignal.

Read more about ignoring errors.

ignore_logs

Description

List of log messages that will be ignored. Any log message containing any of the elements of the list will not be transmitted to AppSignal. A small subset of regex syntax is supported, read more about it in our Ignore Logs guide.

ignore_namespaces

Description

List of namespaces that will be ignored. Any error raised or slow request that occurs in this namespace will not be send to AppSignal.

Read more about namespaces.

instrument_absinthe

Description

Whether to automatically instrument Telemetry events for the Absinthe package integration, can be true or false.

instrument_ecto

Description

Whether to automatically instrument Telemetry events for the Ecto package integration, can be true or false.

instrument_finch

Description

Whether to automatically instrument Telemetry events for the Finch package integration, can be true or false.

instrument_oban

Description

Whether to automatically instrument Telemetry events for the Oban package integration, can be true or false.

instrument_tesla

Description

Whether to automatically instrument Telemetry events for the Tesla package integration, can be true or false.

log

Description

Select which logger the AppSignal integration will use. Accepted values are file and stdout. See also the log_path configuration.

• file (default)
  • Write all AppSignal logs to the file system.
• stdout (default on Heroku)
  • Print AppSignal logs in the parent process' STDOUT instead of to a file. Useful with hosting solutions such as container systems and Heroku.

log_level

Description

Set the severity level of AppSignal's internal logger. If it is configured to "info" it will log all error, warning and info messages, but not log the debug messages.

Setting it to the levels "debug" or "trace" is usually only needed on request from support. Setting the level to "debug"/"trace" could have a slight impact on the disk usage and IO, especially on high-traffic sites. CPU overhead is minimal with the debug option enabled.

Accepted values:

• error
• warning
• info
• debug
• trace

log_path

Description

Override the location of the path (directory) where the appsignal.log file can be written to.

report_oban_errors

Description

When to report errors received by the Oban package integration's exception event handler while processing a job. Possible values are:

• all: Report all errors for every execution of jobs, including retries.
• discard: Report errors when the job is discarded due to the error. Use this option to only report errors when all job retries have been exhausted.
• none: Report no errors for jobs, including retries.

request_headers

Description

The request_headers config option contains a list of HTTP request headers which are read and stored by the AppSignal Elixir package.

This request_headers config option is an allowlist, which means that it will only take headers as specified by this config option. If this config option is unset it will use the AppSignal default.

Following list is the AppSignal package default.

# config/appsignal.exs
config :appsignal, :config,
  request_headers: ~w(
    accept accept-charset accept-encoding accept-language cache-control
    connection content-length path-info range request-method
    request-uri server-name server-port server-protocol
  )

To configure AppSignal to not store any HTTP request headers on AppSignal transactions, configure the option with an empty list.

# config/appsignal.exs
config :appsignal, :config,
  request_headers: []

revision

Description

Set the app revision to report the currently running version of your app. AppSignal will create a deploy marker when this value changes, and tag all incoming data with the current revision.

When your application is deployed using Kamal, or when it is deployed to Render, or when it is deployed to Heroku and the Heroku Labs: Dyno Metadata feature is enabled, the AppSignal integration will automatically detect the Git commit of the current deployment and use it as the revision.

You can overwrite the automatically detected revisions in Heroku, Render or Kamal by manually setting the revision config option to a custom value.

Read more about deploy markers in the deploy markers topic.

running_in_container

Description

AppSignal expects to be running on the same machine between different deploys. Set this key to true if the application is running in a container, such as with Docker.

Newer versions of the AppSignal integration automatically detect its container environment, so no manual configuration is necessary. If you're having trouble with the automatic detection, please contact support.

This option is set to true automatically on Heroku.

send_environment_metadata

Description

Send environment metadata about the app.

For more information please read about environment metadata.

send_params

Description

Whether to skip sending request parameters to AppSignal.

For more information please read about send_params in filtering request parameters.

send_session_data

Description

Set this option to false to not send any session data with exception traces and performance issue samples.

For more information please read about request session data filtering.

skip_session_data

Description

statsd_port

Description

Set this option to configure the StatsD HTTP server port of the AppSignal agent process. Configure this port if another process is already running on the machine that is also using this port to avoid conflicts.

transaction_debug_mode

Description

Enable transaction debug mode. This enables very detailed logging of transactions and events which is useful when developing integrations or when events aren not tracked as expected. The log is only written if the general debug option is on as well.

working_dir_path

Description

Override the location where AppSignal for Elixir can store temporary files. Use this option if the default location is not suitable. See our how AppSignal operates page for more information about the purpose of this working directory.

If you are running multiple applications using AppSignal on the same server, use this configuration option to select different working directories for every AppSignal instance, otherwise the two instances could conflict with one another. For more information on this scenario see our running multiple applications on one host documentation.

# config/config.exs
config :appsignal, :config,
  working_dir_path: "/tmp/project_1/"

working_directory_path

Description

Override the location where AppSignal for Elixir can store temporary files. Use this option if the default location is not suitable. See our how AppSignal operates page for more information about the purpose of this working directory.

If you are running multiple applications using AppSignal on the same server, use this configuration option to select different working directories for every AppSignal instance, otherwise the two instances could conflict with one another. For more information on this scenario see our running multiple applications on one host documentation.

# config/appsignal.exs
config :appsignal, :config,
  working_directory_path: "/tmp/project_1/"