Stack Trace Rules

Stack trace rules improve issue tracking by ensuring accurate grouping and better classification of stack frames as in-app or system. This helps focus on relevant code, reduces noise, and minimizes false positives. By tailoring rules to your project, you can streamline debugging and maintain consistency across teams or multiple applications.

When you set stack trace rules (previously known as grouping enhancements) for grouping in Sentry, they influence the data that's fed into the grouping algorithm. These rules can be configured on a per-project basis by going to your project settings and then clicking on "Issue Grouping".

Here are a few things to note about stack trace rules:

• Each rule is written on a single line.
• Rules consist of one or more match expressions followed by one or more actions triggered when all expressions match.
• Rules are applied sequentially, from top to bottom, across all frames in the stack trace.

In addition, the stack trace rules using the below matchers and actions can also be applied to incoming profiles to improve frame classification (in-app vs system, for example).

Allowed Matchers:

• stack.abs_path
• stack.module
• stack.function
• stack.package

Allowed Actions:

• +app
• -app

The syntax for stack trace rules is similar to:

matcher-name:expression other-matcher:expression ... action1 action2 ...

If you want to negate the match, prefix the expression with an exclamation mark (!). If a line is prefixed with a hash (#), it's ignored and treated as a comment.

The following is a practical example of how this looks:

# mark all functions in the std namespace to be outside the app
family:native stack.function:std::*       -app

# mark all code in node modules not to be in app
stack.abs_path:**/node_modules/**         -app

# remove all generated javascript code from all grouping
stack.abs_path:**/generated/**.js         -group

Matchers

Multiple matchers can be defined in a line. The following matchers are available:

family:javascript,native stack.abs_path:**/generated/**  -group

# match on all files under `project` with a `.c` extension
stack.abs_path:**/project/**.c +app

# matches on vendor/foo without sub folders
stack.abs_path:**/vendor/foo/*.c -app

# matches on `foo.gen.c` as well as `foo/bar.gen.c`.
stack.abs_path:**/*.gen.c -group

stack.function:myproject_* +app
stack.function:malloc      -group

stack.package:**/libcurl.dylib -group

category:telemetry -group

Matching Sibling Frames

If information about the surrounding frames is necessary to apply a rule to a frame, use caller/callee matching syntax. For example:

# Ignore in-app frames if they are called by telemetry
[ category:telemetry ] | app:yes -group

# Ignore system frames if they call app frames
category:system | [ app:yes ] -group

Actions

There are two types of actions: flag and variables setting.

Flag Actions

A flag identifies the action to be taken if all matchers match, and it uses these prefixes:

• + sets the flag
• - unsets the flag
• ^ applies to frames above the matching frame (toward the crash)
• v applies to frames below the matching frame (away from the crash)

As an example, -group ^-group removes the matching frame and all frames above it from the grouping.

• app: marks or unmarks a frame in-app
• group: adds or removes a frame from grouping

Variable Actions

A limited set of variables can be defined (variable=value):

• max-frames: Sets the total number of frames to be considered for grouping. The default is 0, which means "all frames". If set to 3, only the top three frames are considered.

Example

stack.abs_path:**/node_modules/** -group
stack.abs_path:**/app/utils/requestError.jsx -group
stack.abs_path:**src/getsentry/src/getsentry/** +app

family:native max-frames=3

stack.function:fetchSavedSearches v-group
stack.abs_path:**/app/views/**.jsx stack.function:fetchData ^-group

family:native stack.function:SpawnThread v-app -app
family:native stack.function:_NSRaiseError ^-group -app
family:native stack.function:std::* -app
family:native stack.function:core::* -app

Recommendations

These recommendations will greatly improve your out-of-the-box grouping experience.

Mark in-app Frames

To proactively improve your experience, help Sentry determine which frames in your stack trace are "in-app" (part of your own application) and which are not. The SDK defines the default rules, but in many cases, this can be improved on the server as well. In particular, for languages where server-side processing is necessary (for example, Native C, C++, or JavaScript), it's better to override this on the server.

For instance, the following marks all frames that are below a specific C++ namespace are in-app:

stack.function:myapplication::* +app

See in-app frames for Apple to find out how the sentry-cocoa SDK marks frames as in-app.

Stack Trace Rules

The following marks frames from libdispatch starting with _dispatch_ as inApp.

stack.function:_dispatch_*  +app

You can also achieve the same result by marking other frames "not in-app." However, if that's the case, you should ensure that first all frames are set to "in-app" to override the defaults:

app:no                   +app
stack.function:std::*    -app
stack.function:boost::*  -app

If you're using the sentry-cocoa SDK, you can also achieve the same result by marking other frames not inApp. The following sample marks functions from the classes DataRequest and DownloadRequest as not inApp.

stack.function:DataRequest*  -app
stack.function:DownloadRequest*  -app

Cut Stack Traces

In many cases, you want to remove the top or bottom of the stack trace. For instance, many code bases use a common function to generate an error. In this case, the error machinery will appear as part of the stack trace.

For example, if you use Rust, you likely want to remove some frames that are related to panic handling:

stack.function:std::panicking::begin_panic       ^-app -app ^-group -group
stack.function:core::panicking::begin_panic      ^-app -app ^-group -group

Here we tell the system that all frames from begin-panic to the crash location are not part of the application (including the panic frame itself). All frames above are, in all cases, irrelevant for grouping.

Likewise, you can also remove the base of a stack trace. This is particularly useful if you have different main loops that drive an application:

stack.function:myapp::LinuxMainLoop         v-group -group
stack.function:myapp::MacMainLoop           v-group -group
stack.function:myapp::WinMainLoop           v-group -group

Stack Trace Frame Limits

This isn't useful for all projects, but it can work well for large applications with many crashes. The default strategy is to consider most of the stack trace relevant for grouping. This means that every different stack trace that leads to a crashing function will cause a different group to be created. If you do not want that, you can force the groups to be much larger by limiting how many frames should be considered.

For instance, if any of the frames in the stack trace refer to a common external library, you could tell the system only to consider the top N frames:

# always only consider the top 1 frame for all native events
family:native max-frames=1

# if the bug is in proprietarymodule.so, only consider top 2 frames
family:native stack.package:**/proprietarymodule.so  max-frames=2

# these are functions we want to consider much more of the stack trace for
family:native stack.function:KnownBadFunction1  max-frames=5
family:native stack.function:KnownBadFunction2  max-frames=5