Connect Services

When

tracingThe process of logging the events that took place during a request, often across multiple services.
is enabled, the SDK will attach an outgoing header called sentry-trace to requests. This depends on the out of the box integrations we provide, but you can expect the header sentry-trace to be present. If it's not, you can manually add sentry-trace headers to any requests by learning more about its structure.

SDKs with performance monitoring support listen to incoming requests and typically automatically pick up the incoming sentry-trace header to continue the trace (with the same trace-id) from there, connecting backend and frontend transactions into a single coherent trace using the trace_id value. Depending on the circumstance, this ID is transmitted either in a request header or in an HTML <meta> tag.

All your transactions that have the same trace-id are connected. Linking transactions in this way makes it possible to navigate among them in sentry.io to better understand how the different parts of your system are affecting one another. You can learn more about this model in our Distributed Tracing docs.

If the instrumentation you're using doesn't automatically pick up the sentry-trace header, you can also continue a trace manually by using the continueFromHeaders function on a Transaction. Learn more about this in our Transaction Interface documentation.

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