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Performance Tracing (Beta)

Overview​

Embrace’s Performance Tracing solution gives you complete visibility into any customized operation you’d like to track, enabling you to identify, prioritize, and resolve any performance issue. With our tool, you can quickly spot any bottlenecks in your app’s architecture, pinpoint areas you need to troubleshoot with high precision, and ultimately deliver a truly optimized user experience.

Feature Support​

The Embrace Performance Tracing API allows you to:

  • Create real-time performance timers or record past operations.
    • For real-time tracing, we use a “Stopwatch” concept that lets you start and stop a span's timing manually.
    • To record a past operation, you can pass in start and end times during span creation.
  • Create child spans that can be attached to a parent.
  • Add attributes and events to each span.
    • Attributes have String keys and String values.
    • Events also have a set of attributes that have String keys and values.

There is no limit on the duration of a span, but if a JVM exception occurs before a span ends, the span will auto-close.

Limits​

TypeLimit
Max number of traces per session100
Max number of spans per trace10
Max number of attributes per span50
Max number of events per span10
Max number of attributes per event10
Length of attribute keys50 characters
Length of attribute values200 characters
Length of Span names50 characters
Length of Event names100 characters
Exceeding Limits

If you exceed the listed limits, the operation with the limit-exceeding call will fail and return a value indicating that. See the API documentation for details.

Naming Conventions​

  • Span Names are case-sensitive and are a max of 50 characters.
  • Key Names are case-sensitive, have a max of 50 characters, and are alpha-numeric
Internal Prefixes

The emb- and emb. prefixes are reserved for internal Embrace attributes and span names. You should never create a name with emb- and emb. prefixes

Integration Steps​

Minimum SDK Version

We recommend using at least Android SDK v5.25.0 and updating to new versions as they come out to ensure you get the latest updates for this developing feature.

To use this feature:

  1. Contact your Embrace Customer Success Manager to enrol your apps in the Peformance Tracing Beta (done on a per-app basis).
  2. Ensure you’re using a version of the Embrace SDK that supports Performance Tracing.
  3. Instrument your app using the reference guide in this sections to start adding traces to your operations.
  4. See the traces in the Traces section of the Embrace dashboard.

Create Span​

// Create a trace by creating its root span
val activityLoad = Embrace.getInstance().createSpan("load-activity"))

Start Span​

val activityLoad = Embrace.getInstance().createSpan("load-activity"))

// Starting a trace by starting its root span
activityLoad?.start()

Adding a Child Span​

val activityLoad = Embrace.getInstance().createSpan("load-activity")
activityLoad?.start()

// Create a child span - if activityLoad's creation fails, imageLoad will be the root span
val imageLoad = Embrace.getInstance().createSpan("load-image", activityLoad))

Adding Events and Attributes​

val activityLoad = Embrace.getInstance().createSpan("load-activity")
activityLoad?.start()

val imageLoad = Embrace.getInstance().createSpan("load-image", activityLoad)
imageLoad?.start()

val image = fetchImage()

// record important event at point in time
imageLoad?.addEvent("network-request-finished")

// record attribute particular to this span instance
imageLoad?.addAttribute("image-name", image.name)

End Span​

val activityLoad = Embrace.getInstance().createSpan("load-activity")
activityLoad?.start()

val imageLoad = Embrace.getInstance().createSpan("load-image", activityLoad)
imageLoad?.start()

val image = fetchImage()
imageLoad?.addEvent("network-request-finished")
imageLoad?.addAttribute("image-name", image.name)

/* process image */

// Stop the span, record it as being successful
imageLoad?.stop()

/* User navigates away before the activity is loaded */

// Stop the trace, record the span as having failed due to user abandonment
activityLoad?.stop(ErrorCode.USER_ABANDON)

Recording a Completed Span​

// Record completed span
Embrace.getInstance().recordCompletedSpan(
  "activity-create", 
  startTimeNanos, 
  endTimeNanos,
  mapOf(Pair("activity-name", "Main Activity")),
  null
)

Support​

If you have any questions or if something is not working as intended, please get in touch with your Customer Success Manager.