How do I sort and filter sample data?

AppSignal is designed to help you quickly get to the root cause of errors and performance issues.

This guide will familiarise you with AppSignal's filtering and sorting functionality, so you can quickly navigate to issues and samples with ease.

This article will help you to:

• ✅ Add tags to performance and error samples
• ✅ Sort and filter issue lists
• ✅ Filter and sort samples
• ✅ Filter saved samples
• ✅ Customize sample overviews

Add tags to performance and error samples

Tags are a great way to add additional context to performance and error samples. You could, for example, create tags containing user ids or other important logic like organization ids or order ids, to help you quickly access sample data relevant to specific contexts, like:

• All samples for a specific user
• All samples for a specific organization
• All samples for a specific order

You can set tags wherever the current transaction or span is accessible. We recommend calling a tag before your application code runs in a request, such as a callback.

Let's imagine we have an e-commerce application that handles payments. We want to add tags to user_id and stripe_customer_id fields in samples to help us better filter issues. Below are examples of how to do this depending on which language you use:

• Ruby
• Elixir
• Node.js
• Python

Ruby

Use the Appsignal.tag_request helper method:

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

Elixir

Use the Appsignal.Span.set_sample_data helper function:

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

Node.js

Use the imported setTag helper function:

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

Python

Use the set_tag helper method:

from appsignal import set_tag
 
set_tag("user_id", user_id)
set_tag("stripe_customer_id", stripe_customer_id)

Once that's configured, you'll see the following data when viewing error or performance samples in AppSignal:

You can then use those tags to filter and sort sample data in AppSignal.

You can learn more about tagging by reading our Adding tags to a request documentation.

Sort and filter issue lists

By default, AppSignal offers six filterable variables for error and performance samples:

• Namespace: The namespace where the incident occurred, for example, web, frontend, backend, or a custom namespace name.
• Status: The status of an issue, which can have one of the following values:
  • Open
  • Work in progress
  • Closed
• Severity: The severity of the issue, in order from most to least critical:
  • Critical
  • High
  • Low
  • Informational
  • No severity set
• Assignee: The team member assigned to an issue.
• Action name: The name of the action where an issue occurred.
• Deployment: Filter issues to a specific deployment.

You can use these filters to search and filter issues in the Performance and Errors Issue lists.

Performance issue list columns

Issues can also be sorted in ascending or descending order alphabetically or numerically by clicking on the relevant column:

Error issue list columns

Filter and sort samples

When viewing an error or performance issue, you can filter samples of other occurrences for the same issue. The attributes that can be filtered will vary depending on what custom data tags you track with AppSignal. Clicking on an attribute value will automatically apply a filter to the overview.

Samples can be sorted in ascending or descending order by clicking on the relevant column:

Performance issue

(This ignores any custom data tags your application tracks.)

Error issue

(This ignores any custom data tags your application tracks.)

Filter saved samples

When reviewing an issue's saved sample, you can navigate and filter other saved samples. By default, you can filter samples based on datetime. Revisions are also a great way to quickly filter samples to a specific deployment. If you've configured deploy markers, you will see them in the saved samples list.

Samples can be filtered by using tag values in the Saved samples search bar, or by clicking on the filter icon in the "Tags for sample" table.

Customize sample overviews

To make it easier to filter error and performance samples, you can customize what attributes the issue sample table shows.

What attributes are available will depend on what data you send to AppSignal.

To learn more about sending custom data via tags, we recommend reading our tagging documentation.