Event Payloads

Events are the fundamental data that clients, often through the use of an SDK, send to the Sentry server.

Events are packed into envelopes and are sent to the /api/{PROJECT_ID}/envelope/ API endpoint.

Sending event payloads to the /api/{PROJECT_ID}/store/ API endpoint is deprecated.

Required Attributes

Attributes are simple data that Sentry understands to provide the most basic information about events. These are things like the unique ID of an event or the time when it occurred.

The following attributes are required for all events.

timestamp

: Indicates when the event was created in the Sentry SDK. The format is either a string as defined in RFC 3339 or a numeric (integer or float) value representing the number of seconds that have elapsed since the Unix epoch.

{
  "timestamp": "2011-05-02T17:41:36Z"
}

or:

{
  "timestamp": 1304358096.0
}

platform

: A string representing the platform the SDK is submitting from. This will be used by the Sentry interface to customize various components in the interface.

{
  "platform": "python"
}

Acceptable values are:

• as3
• c
• cfml
• cocoa
• csharp
• elixir
• haskell
• go
• groovy
• java
• javascript
• native
• node
• objc
• other
• perl
• php
• python
• ruby

Optional Attributes

Additionally, there are several optional values which Sentry recognizes and are highly encouraged:

level

: The record severity.

Defaults to error.

The value needs to be one on the supported level string values.

{
  "level": "warning"
}

Acceptable values are:

• fatal
• error
• warning
• info
• debug

logger

: The name of the logger which created the record.

{
  "logger": "my.logger.name"
}

transaction

: The name of the transaction which caused this exception.

For example, in a web app, this might be the route name.

{
  "transaction": "/users/<username>/"
}

server_name

: Identifies the host from which the event was recorded.

{
  "server_name": "foo.example.com"
}

release

: The release version of the application.

Release versions must be unique across all projects in your organization. This value can be the git SHA for the given project, or a product identifier with a semantic version (suggested format my-project-name@1.0.0).

{
  "release": "my-project-name@1.0.0"
}

dist

: The distribution of the application.

Distributions are used to disambiguate build or deployment variants of the same release of an application. For example, the dist can be the build number of an Xcode build or the version code of an Android build.

{
  "release": "721e41770371db95eee98ca2707686226b993eda",
  "dist": "14G60"
}

environment

: The environment name, such as production or staging. The default value should be production.

{
  "environment": "production"
}

modules

: A list of relevant modules and their versions.

{
  "modules": {
    "my.module.name": "1.0"
  }
}

extra

: An arbitrary mapping of additional metadata to store with the event.

{
  "extra": {
    "my_key": 1,
    "some_other_value": "foo bar"
  }
}

fingerprint

: A list of strings used to dictate the deduplication of this event.

{
  "fingerprint": ["myrpc", "POST", "/foo.bar"]
}

For information about overriding grouping see Customize Grouping with Fingerprints.

errors

: A list of errors in capturing or handling this event. This provides meta data about event capturing and processing itself, not about the error or transaction that the event represents.

This list is primarily populated by Sentry when receiving and processing the event. SDKs are only encouraged to add entries here if there are severe conditions that Sentry cannot detect by inspecting the remaining payload.

Errors must contain a required type field, which can be one of the types declared in the Sentry EventError model. If there is no applicable type variant, consider opening an issue to suggest the addition.

Apart from types, any attribute is valid. There are conventions for the semantics of common error attributes, if they are included:

• name: A string declaring the path to the payload field that causes or exhibits the error. For example modules[0].name.
• value: The original value of a field that causes or exhibits the error.

{
  "errors": [
    {
      "type": "unknown_error",
      "path": "/var/logs/errors.log.1",
      "details": "Failed to read attachment"
    }
  ]
}

Size Limits

Event ingestion imposes limits on the size of events. These limits are subject to future change and defined currently as:

• 1MB decompressed (and 200KB compressed) for events of type error
• 1MB decompressed (and 200KB compressed) for events of type transaction

Sessions, client reports, replays, check-ins, and profiles are not events and have different size limits. See Envelope Size Limits.

Core Interfaces

All values in the event payload that are not basic attributes are data interfaces. The key is the canonical interface short name, and the value is the data expected by the interface (usually a dictionary).

For the most part, interfaces are an evolving part of Sentry. Like with attributes, SDKs are expected to assume that more interfaces will be added at any point in the future.

The core data interfaces are:

• Exception Interface
• Message Interface
• Stack Trace Interface
• Template Interface

Scope Interfaces

• Breadcrumbs Interface
• User Interface
• Request Interface
• Contexts Interface
• Threads Interface

Other Interfaces

• Debug Meta Interface
• SDK Interface

Type Definitions

• Event Type Definitions