Set Up Session Replay

Learn how to enable the Beta of Mobile Session Replay in your app.

Mobile support for Session Replay is in Beta. Features available in Beta are still work-in-progress and may have bugs. We recognize the irony.

If you have any questions, feedback or would like to report a bug, please open a GitHub issue with a link to a relevant replay in Sentry if possible.

Session Replay helps you get to the root cause of an error or latency issue faster by providing you with a reproduction of what was happening in the user's device before, during, and after the issue. You can rewind and replay your application's state and see key user interactions, like taps, swipes, network requests, and console entries, in a single UI.

By default, our Session Replay SDK masks all text content, images, and user input, giving you heightened confidence that no sensitive data will leave the device. To learn more, see product docs.

Make sure your Sentry Flutter SDK version is at least 8.9.0, which is required for Session Replay. You can update your pubspec.yaml to the matching version:

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dependencies:
  sentry_flutter: ^8.9.0

To set up the integration, add the following to your Sentry initialization.

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await SentryFlutter.init(
  (options) {
    ...
    options.experimental.replay.sessionSampleRate = 1.0;
    options.experimental.replay.onErrorSampleRate = 1.0;
  },
  appRunner: () => runApp(MyApp()),
);

While you're testing, we recommend that you set replaysSessionSampleRate to 1.0. This ensures that every user session will be sent to Sentry.

Once testing is complete, we recommend lowering this value in production. We still recommend keeping replaysOnErrorSampleRate set to 1.0.

Sampling allows you to control how much of your website's traffic will result in a Session Replay. There are two sample rates you can adjust to get the replays relevant to you:

  1. replaysSessionSampleRate - The sample rate for replays that begin recording immediately and last the entirety of the user's session.
  2. replaysOnErrorSampleRate - The sample rate for replays that are recorded when an error happens. This type of replay will record up to a minute of events prior to the error and continue recording until the session ends.

Sampling begins as soon as a session starts. replaysSessionSampleRate is evaluated first. If it's sampled, the replay recording will begin. Otherwise, replaysOnErrorSampleRate is evaluated and if it's sampled, the integration will begin buffering the replay and will only upload it to Sentry if an error occurs. The remainder of the replay will behave similarly to a whole-session replay.

The SDK is recording and aggressively redacting (masking) all text and images, according to the configuration in options.experimental.replay. You can tune this and add custom masking rules to fit your needs. For example, you can explicitly mask or unmask widgets by type, or you can even have a callback to decide whether a specific widget instance should be masked:

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  options.experimental.replay.mask<IconButton>();
  options.experimental.replay.unmask<Image>();
  options.experimental.replay.maskCallback<Text>(
      (Element element, Text widget) =>
          (widget.data?.contains('secret') ?? false)
              ? SentryMaskingDecision.mask
              : SentryMaskingDecision.continueProcessing);

You can find more details in respective methods' code documentation.

If you encounter any data not being redacted with the default settings, please let us know through a GitHub issue.

To disable redaction altogether (not to be used on applications with sensitive data):

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  options.experimental.replay.maskAllText = false;
  options.experimental.replay.maskAllImages = false;

Errors that happen while a replay is running will be linked to the replay, making it possible to jump between related issues and replays. However, it's possible that in some cases the error count reported on the Replays Details page won't match the actual errors that have been captured. That's because errors can be lost, and while this is uncommon, there are a few reasons why it could happen:

  • The replay was rate-limited and couldn't be accepted.
  • The replay was deleted by a member of your org.
  • There were network errors and the replay wasn't saved.
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