Overview

Getting visibility into users and accounts in APM helps you understand which users are affected by performance issues or errors. User and account information is displayed in the APM Investigator and Error Tracking issues.

By tagging traces with user and account identifiers, you can:

• Track which users are impacted by backend errors or latency issues.
• Analyze performance split by user or account segments.
• Monitor user-specific behaviors across your distributed systems.

Tag user and account information in spans

From RUM

If you’re already collecting Real User Monitoring data, you can propagate user and account information from browser or mobile applications to your backend traces:

1. Set user and account information using the datadogRum.setUser() and datadogRum.setAccount() APIs in your browser application.

2. Enable trace propagation by configuring allowedTracingUrls in your RUM SDK initialization. See Connect RUM and Traces for detailed setup instructions. Additionally, set propagateTraceBaggage to true, to automatically propagate user and account context in the baggage to backend traces alongside the trace context.

The user and account information is automatically remapped in the backend to the usr.id and account.id standard attributes, making it consistent across all your traces. Standard attributes allow you to filter and search your trace data consistently across all your services.

From APM SDKs

For backend services or applications without RUM, you can tag spans directly using APM SDKs:

1. Use the span tagging API (set_tag, SetTag, or setTag depending on your language) to add usr.id and account.id attributes to your spans.

2. To propagate user and account information across service boundaries, use trace context propagation with baggage.

Example (Python):

from ddtrace import tracer

# Tag the span with user and account information
span = tracer.current_root_span()
span.set_tag("usr.id", "user_123")
span.set_tag("account.id", "account_456")

# Set baggage to propagate across service boundaries
span.context.set_baggage_item("user.id", "user_123")
span.context.set_baggage_item("account.id", "account_456")

Note: When propagating user and account information through baggage, this information is only tagged on service entry spans. This means the usr.id and account.id attributes appear on the first span of each service in your distributed trace.

Query trace data with user and account information

Tagging spans with user and account IDs enables powerful analysis, giving you visibility into how backend errors and latency affect end-users.

Filter traces by user or account in the APM Trace Explorer

Query traces using the usr.id or account.id attributes:

• Search for all traces from a specific user or account: @usr.id:user_123 or @account.id:account_456.
• Combine with other filters: @usr.id:user_123 service:checkout status:error.

This allows you to investigate issues affecting specific users or accounts and understand their end-to-end experience across your distributed system.

Identify which users or accounts are most affected by errors or latency

Analyze error patterns and latency issues across your user base to prioritize fixes based on business impact:

• Use Tag Analysis to identify which users or accounts are disproportionately affected by errors or high latency on backend services.
• Group queries by usr.id or account.id to analyze error rates or latency percentiles by user or account.
• View user and account impact directly in the APM Investigator and Error Tracking issues to understand the scope of production problems.

This helps you prioritize incident response based on the number of affected users or the importance of affected accounts.

Create monitors and alerts based on user or account segments

Set up APM monitors that alert you when specific user segments experience degraded performance:

• Create error rate monitors filtered by premium account tiers: @account.id:premium_* status:error.
• Alert on latency spikes for critical users: @usr.id:vip_user_* @duration:>5s.
• Monitor SLA compliance for enterprise accounts by setting monitors on specific account IDs.

This enables proactive monitoring and ensures you can respond quickly when high-value users or accounts experience issues.

Further reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Connect RUM and APMDOCUMENTATION Standard AttributesDOCUMENTATION User and Account ProfilesDOCUMENTATION