Configure the Splunk Browser RUM instrumentation 🔗

You can configure the Browser RUM agent from the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry JS for Web to add custom attributes, adapt the instrumentation to your environment and application, customize sampling, and more.

Configuration method 🔗

To configure the Browser RUM agent, edit the object passed to the SplunkRum.init() function:

<script src="https://cdn.signalfx.com/o11y-gdi-rum/latest/splunk-otel-web.js" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<script>
      SplunkRum.init(
      {
         realm: 'us0',
         rumAccessToken: 'ABC123...789',
         applicationName: 'my-awesome-app',
         version: '1.0.1'
         // Any additional settings
      });
</script>

General settings 🔗

Use the following settings to configure the Browser RUM agent:

Property	Type	Description
`realm`	String	The name of your organization’s realm, for example, `us0`. To find the realm name of your account, open the navigation menu in Splunk Observability Cloud, select Settings, and then select your username. The realm name appears in the Organizations section.
`rumAccessToken`	String (required)	RUM token that authorizes the agent to send telemetry data to Splunk Observability Cloud. To generate a RUM access token, see Generate your RUM access token in Splunk Observability Cloud.
`beaconEndpoint`	String (required if `realm` isn’t set)	Ingest URL to which the agent sends collected telemetry. When `realm` is set, the URL is in the form `https://rum-ingest.<realm>.signalfx.com/v1/rum`. When you set an endpoint manually, this overrides the value of `realm`.
`applicationName`	String	Name of the application. The default value is `unknown-browser-app`.
`version`	String	Version of the application for all spans. For example, “1.0.1” or “20220820”.
`deploymentEnvironment`	String	Environment for all the spans produced by the application. For example, `dev`, `test`, or `prod`.
`globalAttributes`	Object	Sets additional attributes added to all spans. For example, `version` or `user_id`.
`instrumentations`	Object	Activates or deactivates specific Browser RUM instrumentations. See Instrumentation settings.
`ignoreUrls`	`(string\\|regex)[]`	List of URLs that the agent must ignore. Matching URLs don’t produce spans. You can provide two different types of rules: strings or regular expressions.
`cookieDomain`	String	Domain used for session tracking. For example, if you have sites on both `foo.example.com` and `bar.example.com`, setting `cookieDomain` to `example.com` allows both sites to use the same session identifier. See Cookies used by the Browser RUM agent for more information.
`context.async`	Boolean	Activates the asynchronous context manager. The default value is `true`. See Asynchronous trace settings.
`exporter.onAttributesSerializing`	`(a: SpanAttributes, s?: Span) => SpanAttributes`	Provides a callback for modifying span attributes before they’re exported. The default value is `(attrs) => attrs`. A sample scenario is Sanitize Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
`tracer`	Object	Tracing configuration passed to `WebTracerProvider`. You can use it to configure sampling. See Sampling settings.
`debug`	Boolean	Activates debug logging in the developer console. The default value is `false`.

Instrumentation settings 🔗

To activate or deactivate specific Browser RUM instrumentations, compose and pass an object to the instrumentations property. The following example of agent initialization changes the settings of several instrumentations:

SplunkRum.init(
   {
      beaconEndpoint: 'https://rum-ingest.us0.signalfx.com/v1/rum',
      rumAccessToken: 'ABC123…789',
      applicationName: 'my-awesome-app',
      instrumentations:
      {
         interactions:
         {
            // Adds``gamepadconneted`` events to the
            // list of events collected by default
           eventNames: [
             ...SplunkRum.DEFAULT_AUTO_INSTRUMENTED_EVENT_NAMES,
             'gamepadconnected'
           ],
         },
         longtask: false, // Deactivates monitoring for longtasks
         websocket: true, // Activates monitoring for websockets
      },
   });

The following table contains all the properties supported by the instrumentations option:

Property	Default	Description
`connectivity`	`false`	Activates the collection of connectivity events. See Connectivity.
`document`	`true`	Activates the collection of spans related to document load events. See Document load.
`errors`	`true`	Activates the collection of JavaScript errors. See Errors collected by the Browser RUM agent.
`fetch`	`true`	Activates the collection of Fetch API requests. See XHR and Fetch instrumentations.
`interactions`	`true`	Activates the collection of user interactions, such as clicks or key presses. See User interactions.
`interactions.eventNames`		Array of DOM events that the instrumentation captures as user interactions. You can access the default values by accessing the `SplunkRum.DEFAULT_AUTO_INSTRUMENTED_EVENT_NAMES` property.
`longtask`	`true`	Activates the collection of long tasks. See Long tasks.
`socketio`	`false`	Activates the collection of socket.io messages. See Socket.io messages.
`postload`	`true`	Activates the collection of resources loaded after a load event. See Resources after load.
`socketio.target`	`'io'`	The global variable name to which the socket.io client is loaded, or the `io` object. See Socket.io messages.
`visibility`	`false`	Activates the collection of visibility events. See Visibility.
`websocket`	`false`	Activates the collection of websocket lifecycle events. See Websockets.
`webvitals`	`true`	Activates the collection of Google Web Vitals metrics. See Web Vitals.
`xhr`	`true`	Activates the collection of XMLHttpRequest events. See XHR and Fetch instrumentations.

Sampling settings 🔗

By default, the Browser RUM agent collects all of the data from all of the users. You can adjust sampling by passing a custom sampler to the tracer property.

The following example shows how to restrict sampling to logged in users:

<script src="https://cdn.signalfx.com/o11y-gdi-rum/latest/splunk-otel-web.js" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<script>
   var shouldTrace = isUserLoggedIn();

   SplunkRum.init({
      realm: '<realm>',
      rumAccessToken: '<your_rum_token>',
      applicationName: '<application-name>',
      tracer: {
         sampler: shouldTrace ? new AlwaysOnSampler() : new SplunkRum.AlwaysOffSampler(),
      },
   });
</script>

// When using npm you can get samplers directly from @opentelemetry/core
import {AlwaysOnSampler, AlwaysOffSampler} from '@opentelemetry/core';
import SplunkOtelWeb from '@splunk/otel-web';

SplunkOtelWeb.init({
   beaconEndpoint: 'https://rum-ingest..signalfx.com/v1/rum',
   rumAccessToken: '<your_rum_token>',
   applicationName: '<application-name>',
   tracer: {
      sampler: userShouldBeTraced() ? new SplunkRum.AlwaysOnSampler() : new SplunkRum.AlwaysOffSampler(),
   },
});

The Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry JS for Web includes the following samplers:

Sampler	Description
`AlwaysOnSampler`	Sampling activated for all requests. This is the default sampler.
`AlwaysOffSampler`	Sampling deactivated for all requests.
`ParentBasedSampler`	Inherits the sampler configuration of the parent trace.
`SessionBasedSampler`	Session-based sampling. See Session-based sampler.

Session-based sampler 🔗

The Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry JS for Web includes a custom sampler that supports sessions. Session ratios are preferable to trace ratios, as they keep data from each session intact.

You can access the session-based sampler in the following ways:

Use the SplunkRum.SessionBasedSampler export when using the Splunk CDN build.
Use the SessionBasedSampler export when using the npm package.

The session-based sampler accepts the following settings:

Option	Type	Default value	Description
`ratio`	`number`	`1.0`	Percentage of sessions reported, ranging from `0.0` to `1.0`.
`sampled`	`Sampler`	`AlwaysOnSampler`	Sampler to be used when the session is sampled.
`notSampled`	`Sampler`	`AlwaysOffSampler`	Sampler to be used when the session is not to be sampled.

The following example shows how to collect RUM data from half of the sessions:

<script src="https://cdn.signalfx.com/o11y-gdi-rum/latest/splunk-otel-web.js" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<script>
  SplunkRum.init({
    realm: '<realm>',
    rumAccessToken: '<your_rum_token>',
    applicationName: '<application-name>',
    tracer: {
      sampler: new SplunkRum.SessionBasedSampler({
      ratio: 0.5
      }),
    },
  });
</script>

import SplunkOtelWeb, {SessionBasedSampler} from '@splunk/otel-web';

SplunkOtelWeb.init({
  realm: '<realm>',
  rumAccessToken: '<your_rum_token>',
  applicationName: '<application-name>',
  tracer: {
      sampler: new SessionBasedSampler({
        ratio: 0.5
      }),
  },
});

Asynchronous trace settings 🔗

Traces that happen asynchronously, such as user interactions that result in a promise chain, might get disconnected from parent activity. To avoid this problem, the Browser RUM agent includes a custom context manager that connects parent traces with traces that happen when using the following properties or patterns:

setTimeout with less than 34ms timeout
setImmediate
requestAnimationFrame
Promise.then / catch / finally
MutationObserver on textNode
MessagePort
Hash-based routers

Asynchronous trace linking is activated by default. In case of compatibility issues you can disable it by setting the context.async property to false.

The context manager allows Splunk RUM to link requests executed when a component is first rendered to the user interaction that caused the application to add the component to the page. XMLHttpRequest events and Fetch API events through promise methods are patched to preserve the parent context, so subsequent requests link to their parents.

Limitations 🔗

The following limitations apply when using asynchronous tracing:

async/await functions aren’t supported. Down-compile the code using Babel and targeting older browsers.

document.getElementById('save-button').addEventListener('click', async () => {
  const saveRes = await fetch('/api/items', {method: 'POST'});

  const listRes = await fetch('/api/items'); // Can be disconnected from click event when not transpiled
});

Only code loaded by promise-based implementations is linked to the parent interaction.

Context propagation settings 🔗

The Browser RUM agent doesn’t register any context propagators, as it collects traceparent data from Server-Timing headers. If needed, you can register context propagators by using the OpenTelemetry API:

import {propagation} from '@opentelemetry/api';
import {B3Propagator} from '@opentelemetry/propagator-b3';

propagation.setGlobalPropagator(new B3Propagator());

When calling the OpenTelemetry API directly, make sure the API version you’re using matches the one used by the Browser RUM agent.

Exporter settings 🔗

By default, the Browser RUM agent uses the Zipkin exporter to send data to Splunk Observability Cloud.

Starting from version 0.17.0 and higher, you can configure the RUM agent to use the OTLP exporter. The following example shows how to configure the RUM instrumentation to use the OTLP exporter:

   SplunkRum.init({
      realm: '<realm>',
      rumAccessToken: '<your_rum_token>',
      applicationName: '<application-name>',
      deploymentEnvironment: '<deployment-env>',
      exporter: {
         otlp: true
      },
   });

When setting the beaconEndpoint manually, use https://rum-ingest.<realm>.signalfx.com/v1/rumotlp as the OTLP endpoint. The endpoint is set automatically when exporter.otlp is true and a realm is configured.

Cookies used by the Browser RUM agent 🔗

The Browser RUM agent uses the following cookies to link traces to sessions:

Name	Purpose	Comment
`__splunk_rum_sid`	Stores the session ID.	By default, a session lasts for 15 minutes after the last user interaction. The maximum session duration is 4 hours.

This page was last updated on May 14, 2024.

Related Topics

Configure the Splunk Browser RUM instrumentation 🔗

Configuration method 🔗

General settings 🔗

Instrumentation settings 🔗

Sampling settings 🔗

Session-based sampler 🔗

Asynchronous trace settings 🔗

Limitations 🔗

Context propagation settings 🔗

Exporter settings 🔗

Cookies used by the Browser RUM agent 🔗

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