Adding Tags to a Request

You can use tagging to supply extra context on errors and performance incidents. Tagging can help to add information that is not already part of a request, such as the session data, headers, environment data, or parameters. Tags can also be used to filter on samples within an incident to find all errors for a specific user or slow pages for a particular locale.

You can set tags wherever the current transaction or span is accessible. We recommend calling it before your application code runs in a request, such as a callback. You can see what tags apply to a sample on the Error and Performance incident page.

Using Link Templates it's possible to add links to your application with tag data, such as the admin panel for the signed-in user. You can see this in practice in the below screenshot, with the Link 1 and Link 2 tags.

Tag a request

Do not use tagging to send personal data such as names or email addresses to AppSignal. If you want to identify a person, consider using a user ID, hash, or pseudonymized identifier instead. You could also use Link Templates to link them back to them in your application.

Ruby

With the AppSignal for Ruby gem, use the Appsignal.tag_request (or Appsignal.tag_job) helper methods to add tags to error and performance samples.

You can use Appsignal.tag_request wherever the current transaction is accessible, we recommend calling it before your application code runs in the request, such as in a before_action using Rails.

ruby
before_action do Appsignal.tag_request( :user_id => current_user.id, :stripe_customer_id => stripe_customer_id, :locale => I18n.locale, :default_locale => I18n.default_locale ) end

Limitations

Tags that do not meet these limitations are dropped without warning.

  • The tag key must be a String or Symbol.
  • The tagged value must be a String, Symbol or Integer.
  • The length of the tag key and tagged value must be less than 100 characters.
  • Nested hash values are not supported for tags, please use custom data instead.
ruby
# Unsupported: hash value type is not supported Appsignal.tag_request( :i18n => { :locale => I18n.locale, :default_locale => I18n.default_locale } )

Elixir

Use the Appsignal.Span.set_sample_data function to supply extra context on errors and performance samples. Use the "tags" sample key for the function to add tags to the span.

elixir
Appsignal.Span.set_sample_data( Appsignal.Tracer.root_span, "tags", %{ locale: "en", user_id: user_id, stripe_customer_id: stripe_customer_id, locale: locale, default_locale: default_locale } )

Last call is leading

The set_sample_data helper can be called multiple times, but only the last value will be retained. When the code is run below:

elixir
Appsignal.Span.set_sample_data(Appsignal.Tracer.root_span, "tags", %{locale: "en"}) Appsignal.Span.set_sample_data(Appsignal.Tracer.root_span, "tags", %{user: "bob"}) Appsignal.Span.set_sample_data(Appsignal.Tracer.root_span, "tags", %{locale: "de"})

it will result in the following tags being stored:

elixir
%{ locale: "de" }

Limitations

Tags that do not meet these limitations are dropped without warning.

  • The tag key must be a String or Atom.
  • The tagged value must be a String, Atom or Integer.
  • Nested map values are not supported for tags, please use custom data instead.
elixir
# Unsupported: map value type is not supported Appsignal.Span.set_sample_data( Appsignal.Tracer.root_span, "tags", %{ i18n: %{ locale: "en_GB", default_locale: "en_US" } } )

Node.js

Import the setTag helper function to add tags to spans for errors and performance samples.

javascript
import { setTag } from "@appsignal/nodejs"; setTag("user_id", user_id); setTag("stripe_customer_id", stripe_customer_id); setTag("locale", locale); setTag("default_locale", default_locale);

Limitations

Tags that do not meet these limitations are dropped without warning.

  • The tag key must be a String.
  • The tagged value must be a String, Number or Boolean.
  • Nested object values are not supported for tags, please use the setCustomData helper function instead.
javascript
const tracer = appsignal.tracer(); const span = tracer.currentSpan(); # Unsupported: object value type is not supported span.set("i18n", { locale: "en_GB", default_locale: "en_US" });