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Monitoring

Monitoring in Ash has two primary components, Ash.Tracer and :telemetry. Monitoring might also be referred to as observability and instrumentation.

Packages

If you want to integrate with Appsignal, use the AshAppsignal package, which is maintained by the core team. We believe that Appsignal is a great way to get started quickly, is relatively cost effective, and provides a great user experience.

Telemetry

Ash emits the following telemetry events, suffixed with :start and :stop. Start events have system_time measurements, and stop events have system_time and duration measurements. All times will be in the native time unit.

Important

Note the mention of :start and :stop suffixes. The event below [:ash, (domain_short_name), :create], is actually referring to two events, [:ash, (domain_short_name), :create, :start] and [:ash, (domain_short_name), :create, :stop].

_Replace (domain_short_name) with your domain short name, from d:Ash.Domain.Info.short_name.

Events

  • [:ash, (domain_short_name), :create] - The execution of a create action. Use resource_short_name and action metadata to break down measurements.
  • [:ash, (domain_short_name), :update] - The execution of a update action. Use resource_short_name and action metadata to break down measurements.
  • [:ash, (domain_short_name), :read] - The execution of a read action. Use resource_short_name and action metadata to break down measurements.
  • [:ash, (domain_short_name), :destroy] - The execution of a destroy action. Use resource_short_name and action metadata to break down measurements.
  • [:ash, (domain_short_name), :action] - The execution of a generic action. Use resource_short_name and action metadata to break down measurements.
  • [:ash, :changeset] - A changeset being processed for a given action, i.e with Ash.Changeset.for_create. Use resource_short_name metadata to break down measurements.
  • [:ash, :query] - A query being processed for an action, with Ash.Query.for_read. Use resource_short_name metadata to break down measurements.
  • [:ash, :validation] - A validation being run on a changeset. Use resource_short_name and validation metadata to break down measurements.
  • [:ash, :change] - A change being run on a changeset. Use resource_short_name and change metadata to break down measurements.
  • [:ash, :calculation] - A calculation being computed in the app. Use resource_short_name and calculation metadata to break down measurements.
  • [:ash, :before_action] - A before_action being run on a changeset. Use resource_short_name to break down measurements.
  • [:ash, :after_action] - An after_action being run on a changeset. Use resource_short_name to break down measurements.
  • [:ash, :preparation] - A preparation being run on a changeset. Use resource_short_name and preparation metadata to break down measurements.
  • [:ash, :request_step] - The resolution of an internal request. Ash breaks up its operations internally into multiple requests, this can give you a high resolution insight onto the execution of those internal requests resolution. Use name metadata to break down measurements.
  • [:ash, :flow] - The execution of an Ash flow. Use flow_short_name to break down measurements.
  • [:ash, :flow, :custom_step] - The execution of a custom flow step (only if using the built in runner, which is currently the only runner). Use flow_short_name and name metadata to break down measurements.

Tracing

Tracing is very similar to telemetry, but gives you some additional hooks to set_span_context() and get_span_context(). This allows you to "move" some piece of context between two processes. Ash will call this whenever it starts a new process to do anything. What this means is that if you are using a tracing tool or library you can ensure that any processes spawned by Ash are properly included in the trace. Additionally, you should be able to integrate a tracing library to include Ash actions/spans relatively easily by implementing the other callbacks.

A tracer can be configured globally in application config.

config :ash, :tracer, MyApp.Tracer

Additionally, one can be provide when creating changesets or calling an action, i.e

Resource
# better to put it here, as changesets are traced as well. It will be carried over to the domain action
|> Ash.Changeset.for_create(:create, %{}, tracer: MyApp.Tracer)
# but you can also pass it here.
|> Ash.create!(tracer: MyApp.Tracer)

For customizing the names created for each span, see:

  • d:Ash.Domain.Dsl.execution|trace_name
  • d:Ash.Resource.Dsl.resource|trace_name

Trace types

These are the list of trace types.

  • :custom
  • :action
  • :changeset
  • :validation
  • :change
  • :calculation
  • :before_transaction
  • :before_action
  • :after_transaction
  • :after_action
  • :request_step
  • :custom_flow_step
  • :flow
  • :query
  • :preparation

After/Before Action Hooks

Due to the way before/after action hooks run, their execution time won't be included in the span created for the change. In practice, before/after action hooks are where the long running operations tend to be. We start a corresponding span and emit a telemetry event for before and after hooks, but they are only so useful. In a trace, they can highlight that "some hook" took a long time. In telemetry metrics they are of even less use. The cardinality of the metric would be extremely high, and we don't have a "name" or anything to distinguish them. To that end, you can use the macros & functions available in Ash.Tracer to create custom spans and/or emit custom telemetry events from your hooks. They automatically handle cases where the provided tracer is nil, for convenience. For example:

defmodule MyApp.CustomChange do
  use Ash.Resource.Change

  require Ash.Tracer

  def change(changeset, _, _) do
    changeset
    |> Ash.Changeset.before_action(fn changeset ->
      Ash.Tracer.span(:custom, "custom name", changeset.context[:private][:tracer]) do
        # optionally set some metadata
        metadata = %{...}
        Ash.Tracer.set_metadata(changeset.context[:private][:tracer], :custom, metadata)
        # will get `:start` and `:stop` suffixed events emitted
        Ash.Tracer.telemetry_span([:telemetry, :event, :name], metadata) do
          ## Your logic here
        end
      end
    end)
  end
end