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

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 enables you to start and stop the timing of a span 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 spans, but if a crash occurs during a span that is in progress, that span will not be recorded.

Limits

Type	Limit
Max number of traces per session	100
Max number of spans per trace	10
Max number of attributes per span	50
Max number of events per span	10
Max number of attributes per event	10
Length of attribute keys	50 characters
Length of attribute values	200 characters
Length of Span names	50 characters
Length of Event names	100 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 span names and attribute keys. You should never create a name with emb- and emb. prefixes

Integration Steps

Minimum SDK Version

We recommend using at least iOS SDK v5.23.1 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 enroll 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

Swift

// Create a trace by creating its root span
let span = Embrace.sharedInstance().createSpanNamed("process-image")

Objective-C

// Create a trace by creating its root span
id<EmbraceOTelSpan> span = [[Embrace sharedInstance] createSpanNamed:@"process-image" parent:nil];

Start Span

Swift

let span = Embrace.sharedInstance().createSpanNamed("custom-name")

// start span at current time
span.start()

Objective-C

id<EmbraceOTelSpan> span = [[Embrace sharedInstance] createSpanNamed:@"custom-name"];

// start span at current time
[span start];

Adding a Child Span

Swift

// Create a trace root span with a custom name
let span = Embrace.sharedInstance().createSpanNamed("process-batch")

// Create a child span by including the parent parameter
let childSpan = Embrace.sharedInstance().createSpanNamed("process-item", parent: span)

Objective-C

// Create a trace root span with a custom name
id<EmbraceOTelSpan> span = [[Embrace sharedInstance] createSpanNamed:@"process-batch" parent:nil];

// Create a child span by including the parent parameter
id<EmbraceOTelSpan> childSpan = [[Embrace sharedInstance] createSpanNamed:@"process-item" parent:span];

Adding Events and Attributes

Swift

// Add attributes to spans to provide context
span.addAttribute(withKey: "product.id", value: "ABC123")

// Add span events to mark checkpoints
span.addEventNamed("image-render-complete", time: UInt(Date().timeIntervalSince1970 * pow(10, 9)))

Objective-C

// Add attributes to spans to provide context
[span addAttributeWithKey:@"product.id" value:@"ABC123"];

// Add span events to mark checkpoints
[span addEventNamed:@"image-render-complete"
               time:(NSUInteger)[[NSDate date] timeIntervalSince1970] * NSEC_PER_SEC
         attributes:nil];

End Span

Swift

// Stop span at current time, considered successful
span.stop()

// Stop span at current time with explicit error code
span.stopWith(.Failure)

Objective-C

// Stop span at current time, considered successful
[span stop];

// Stop span at current time with explicit error code
[span stopWithErrorCode: Failure];

Recording a Completed Span

Swift

let startAt = Date()
let endAt = startAt.addingTimeInterval(4.0)

// manually record operation timing after it occurs
Embrace.sharedInstance().recordCompletedSpanNamed(
    "deserialize-data-blob",
    parent: nil,
    startTimeNanos: Int(startAt.timeIntervalSince1970 * pow(10, 9)),
    endTimeNanos: Int(endAt.timeIntervalSince1970 * pow(10, 9)),
    attributes: nil,
    events: nil,
    errorCode: .None
)

Objective-C

NSDate *startAt = [NSDate date];
NSDate *endAt = [startAt dateByAddingTimeInterval:4.0];

// manually record operation timing after it occurs
[[Embrace sharedInstance] recordCompletedSpanNamed:@"deserialize-data-blob"
                                            parent:nil
                                    startTimeNanos:[startAt timeIntervalSince1970] * NSEC_PER_SEC
                                      endTimeNanos:[endAt timeIntervalSince1970] * NSEC_PER_SEC
                                        attributes:nil
                                            events:nil
                                         errorCode:None];

Support

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