Ignore actions

In an app there may be certain actions that you don't want to report to AppSignal. The most common use case is a web endpoint that your load balancer uses to check if your app is still responding or your entire administration panel. This causes a lot of traffic but is not a crucial endpoint to have AppSignal monitor. In fact, it may even distort averages in a namespace and make graph data unusable.

Ignoring actions

These actions can be ignored by customizing the configuration for AppSignal integrations in apps. The "ignore actions" configuration option will allow you to configure a list of action names, as reported to AppSignal. Any action in this list will be ignored, meaning the data from these actions will not be sent to the AppSignal servers, and will not count towards your organization's billing plan.

The "ignore actions" config option is configured differently per integration language. See the list of integrations below for the one your app uses.

Ruby

To ignore actions in Ruby, add the following to your AppSignal configuration file. The ignore_actions value is an Array of Strings.

The below example is for a Rails app.

# Example: config/appsignal.yml
production:
  ignore_actions:
    - "UptimeController#healthcheck"
    - "AdminController#index"
    - "Admin::UsersController#show"
    - "Admin::UsersController#edit"
    - "MyBackgroundWorker#perform"
  # Other config

If you use Sinatra or any other framework, use the HTTP method and path you used to specify your route, for example:

default: &defaults
  ignore_actions:
    - "GET /healthcheck"
    - "GET /pages/:id"
    - "POST /pages/create"

Elixir

To ignore actions in Elixir, add the following to your AppSignal configuration file. The ignore_actions value is a List of Strings.

# Example: config/appsignal.exs
config :appsignal, :config,
  ignore_actions: ["AppsignalPhoenixExampleWeb.UptimeController#healthcheck", "AppsignalPhoenixExampleWeb.AdminController#index"]

Node.js

To ignore actions in Node.js, add the following to your AppSignal configuration file. The ignoreActions value is an Array of Strings.

The name of a Span maps to an "action name" on AppSignal.com. An action name is used to identify the location of a certain sample error and performance issues. You can see a list of these in the "Action name" column of the Issue list under Performance in the sidebar.

const appsignal = new Appsignal({
  # Other config
  ignoreActions: ["GET /pages/:id", "GET /healthcheck", "GET /admin"]
})

Next steps

• Ignore namespaces - the next step in this guide

• Ignore errors - the previous step in this guide
• Filtering app data - the start of this guide
• Getting started guides - Guides overview