Setting Up Distributed Tracing in Electron

That slow API call in your Electron app — is it the database? A downstream service? Network latency? Distributed tracing tells you definitively.

Getting Started

Setting up distributed tracing in your Electron project with Bugsly is straightforward. The entire process takes just a few minutes, and you'll immediately start seeing events in your dashboard.

Installation

npm install @bugsly/electron

Configuration

const Bugsly = require("@bugsly/electron");

Bugsly.init({
  dsn: "YOUR_BUGSLY_DSN",
  tracesSampleRate: 1.0,
});

// Captures crashes in both main and renderer processes

Verification

After adding the SDK, trigger a test error to confirm everything works. Check your Bugsly dashboard — the event should appear within seconds, complete with stack trace and context data.

Best Practices for Electron Distributed Tracing

Group by fingerprint. Bugsly automatically groups similar errors, but you can customize fingerprinting for Electron-specific patterns like route-based grouping or middleware errors.

Filter noise early. Use beforeSend to drop expected errors — like 404s from bots or network errors from flaky connections — before they consume your event quota.

Track releases consistently. Bugsly correlates errors with specific releases, so always set the release version. This makes it trivial to identify which deploy introduced a regression.

Monitor performance alongside errors. With tracesSampleRate enabled, Bugsly captures transaction data too, connecting slow endpoints with their associated errors for a complete picture of your Electron application's health.

Next Steps

With distributed tracing active, use Bugsly's trace explorer to find slow spans and identify bottlenecks across services. Set up performance alerts for transactions that exceed your latency budgets. Tag traces with custom attributes to filter by specific users, endpoints, or business operations.