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Find Slow HTTP requests

Requests and background jobs can be slow for various reasons, but a common cause are slow HTTP requests to external services. This can include sending emails, fetching data from third-party APIs, and other HTTP requests.

AppSignal's Slow Requests feature makes it easier to find an application's slowest HTTP requests, to help you decide which requests require optimization or should be moved to asynchronous processes.

View your application's Slow Requests.

Finding Slow Requests for Ruby, Elixir, Node.js and Python

The type of event groups that can be found in the Slow Requests page are listed below.

  • faraday
  • grpc
  • http
  • http_rb
  • net_http
  • excon
  • request
  • requests
  • service
  • finch
  • tesla
  • fetch

Events may be grouped under the HTTP library's event group name for some integrations.

If your application is reporting HTTP requests in a differently named attribute, or you would like to customize the recognized attributes, please give us feedback.

Finding Slow Requests for OpenTelemetry

For OpenTelemetry-based integrations, we look for spans with a certain set of attributes listed below. We follow the OpenTelemetry HTTP client span specification.

For the HTTP request server name, we look for the following attributes in order:

  • server.address
  • net.peer.name
  • http.server_name

One of these attributes must be present, and not empty.

For the HTTP request method, we look for the following attributes in order:

  • http.request.method
  • http.method

If neither is present, the system will be shown as Unknown.

If your application is reporting HTTP requests in a differently named attribute, or you would like to customize the recognized attributes, please give us feedback.

Sorting HTTP requests

By default the slow HTTP requests list is sorted by impact: the requests that take up the most time either by duration or by how often they are performed.

It is also possible to sort this table by "Throughput", how often the request has been recorded, and "Mean", the mean duration of the requests.

HTTP Request Details

Query details screenshot

You can click on an HTTP request to gain the following insights:

  • Domain that was contacted
  • Which HTTP request method was used
  • The HTTP request event summary:
    • Mean duration of the HTTP request
    • Throughput, how often the HTTP request was recorded
    • The impact of the HTTP request in percentage of all HTTP requests in the selected timeframe.
  • Response time graph
  • Throughput graph
  • Actions and performance measurements in which the event occurred:
    • You can go directly to actions and performance measurements in which the event was recorded to view the impact per request/background job in the sample event timeline.