Ignore Actions

There may be specific actions in your application you don't want to report to AppSignal. The most common use case is a web endpoint that your load balancer uses to check if your application is still responding or all actions that occur within your application's admin panel.

These endpoints may receive a lot of traffic but are not crucial endpoints to have AppSignal monitor and may disrupt the usability of metrics AppSignal provides you for your application's namespaces.

Ignoring Actions

Specific actions can ignore actions by using the "ignore actions" option in your application's AppSignal integration configuration. The "ignore actions" configuration option allows you to define a denylist of actions you want to ignore. All actions in this list will be ignored, meaning the data from these actions will not be sent to the AppSignal servers and will not count towards your organization's billing plan.

This guide will show you how to configure your ignore action denylist in the language your application uses:

• Ruby
• Elixir
• Node.js

Note: This configuration is not available for Front-end JavaScript.

Ruby

To ignore actions in Ruby, add the following to your AppSignal configuration file. The ignore_actions value is an Array of Strings.

The below example is for a Rails application.

# Example: config/appsignal.yml
production:
  ignore_actions:
    - "UptimeController#healthcheck"
    - "AdminController#index"
    - "Admin::UsersController#show"
    - "Admin::UsersController#edit"
    - "MyBackgroundWorker#perform"
  # Other config

If you use Sinatra or any other framework, use the HTTP method and path you used to specify your route, for example:

default: &defaults
  ignore_actions:
    - "GET /healthcheck"
    - "GET /pages/:id"
    - "POST /pages/create"

Elixir

To ignore actions in Elixir, add the following to your AppSignal configuration file. The ignore_actions value is a List of Strings.

# Example: config/appsignal.exs
config :appsignal, :config,
  ignore_actions: ["AppsignalPhoenixExampleWeb.UptimeController#healthcheck", "AppsignalPhoenixExampleWeb.AdminController#index"]

Node.js

To ignore actions in Node.js, add the following to your AppSignal configuration file. The ignoreActions value is an Array of Strings.

The name of a Span maps to an "action name" on AppSignal.com. An action name is used to identify the location of a certain sample error and performance issues. You can see a list of these in the "Action name" column of the Issue list under Performance in the sidebar.

const appsignal = new Appsignal({
  # Other config
  ignoreActions: ["GET /pages/:id", "GET /healthcheck", "GET /admin"]
})

Next Step

• Ignore Namespaces - the next step in this guide

Previous Step

• Ignore Errors - the next step in this guide