Tags make it easy to add additional context to error and performance data. This guide will explain how tags work in AppSignal and how to use them to enhance your insights and debugging capabilities.

What are tags?

Tags are additional data points you can manually add to the performance and error data you send to AppSignal.

You can send virtually any data point to AppSignal in a tag, so long as it's not Private Personal Information (PPI). Private personal information includes things like names, emails, and telephone numbers.

You could, for example, add tags containing a locale and UUID (Universal Unique Identifier).

How can I utilize tags in AppSignal?

AppSignal displays tags in the summary of errors and performance incidents, and you can use tags to filter data in AppSignal.

For example, if you inspect an error with a UUID tag for a user, you could filter for all error samples containing that UUID to see if a specific context triggers the issue.

How can I add tags to my requests?

Adding tags to a request is easy, thanks to AppSignal's helper methods. Below are some examples of how to add tags to a request in our Ruby, Elixir, Node.js, and Python integrations:

You can learn more about adding tags to a request in our tagging and sample data documentation.

Adding link tags to a request

To make debugging even easier, AppSignal allows you to use link templates to add tags to your requests that immediately take you to a specific URL, such as your app's admin panel.

For this you will need to create a link template in AppSignal for a specific tag. Once this is created AppSignal will provide a link for every sample in your app that contains the specific tag. Link tags are formatted like so:

[tag]yourlinkhere

For example, when linking to your admin panel for all samples with a user_id tag, you could create a link template like so:

[customer_orders]http://www.stroopwafels.com/admin/customers/%user_id%

Resulting in tags that link you directly to a specific part of your application for speedier debugging:

What next?

Now you've learned the basics of tagging, it's time to learn about all of the other handy features AppSignal has that help make monitoring easy. We recommend:

1. Reading our tagging documentation.
2. Learning more about our features in our five minute guide.
3. Reading our blog for more monitoring tips.

If you've got any questions about tagging or monitoring, let us know; we're happy to help!