Increasing the inactivity threshold in Sentry Replays

[cristianpoleyJS]

Problem Statement

Our previous provider (Fullstory), the inactivity time was 30 minutes but in Sentry Replays this setting is not configurable and as it is only 5 minutes so we are creating many more Replays than we need, so many Replays are simply "access the application again and close it".

Here is an example: link to Sentry Replay example (I guess you will be able to see it somehow, let me know if you need to).

Solution Brainstorm

To be able to have a new configuration within Sentry to be able to modify the downtime.

[mydea]

Hi @cristianpoleyJS, thanks for writing in!

I am not quite sure I understand the problem, though. From looking at the replay you linked, I see a replay that has a duration of ~2:40 minutes. Is something missing at the start, or the end of this?

How it should be behaving right now (and I assume we are talking about a session-sampled session via replaysSessionSampleRate, not an error-sampled session via replaysOnErrorSampleRate), is that it just pauses the replay when inactive for 5 minutes, but resumes it when a user comes back later, unless a total duration of 60min is exceeded.

[cristianpoleyJS]

Hi @mydea , thanks for the quick reply.

We have just checked if the current behaviour you mentioned works and it seems that it doesn't (maybe some configuration is missing on our side). I'm going to split it in parts:

• fields config

  replaysSessionSampleRate: 1.0,
  replaysOnErrorSampleRate: 1.0

• I access the application at 13:19 GMT+0200 (this Replay is created).
• I check the started field stored in the sessionStorage and it has the date 13:19 GMT+0200
• I do not access that window again for 50 minutes.
• I access the window again and change the route at 14:05 GMT+0200 (before the 60 minutes expire).
• A new session has been generated with the following data (this Replay is created):

{
     "id":"2b401628344747348b111fe5aedf4b72",
     "started":1682337957535,
     "lastActivity":1682337976487,  // is a bit different to `started` because I kept navigating (without reloading) before looking at the sessionStorage
     "segmentId":6,
     "sampled":"session",
     "previousSessionId":"98a91345dc4e4ed1880d2e1532234095"
}

As you can see, the started field now reads Mon Apr 24 2023 14:05:57 GMT+0200.

So basically this is our problem. More sessions are being generated than expected, so if the 60 minutes you are talking about would work, I think it would help us.

[mydea]

Thank you for the detailed report! We'll have a look at this and make sure that this behaves as expected/as it should!

[mydea]

Hello,

we will update the inactivity threshold to 15min - see #7955. This should hopefully alleviate this issue!

[mydea]

Hey @cristianpoleyJS ,

in 7.50.0, the idle timeout has been extended to 15 minutes!

[cristianpoleyJS]

Thanks @mydea & team! that will help to reduce the number of replays