@amplitude/plugin-session-replay-browser

@amplitude/plugin-session-replay-browser

Official Browser SDK plugin for session replay

Installation

This package is published on NPM registry and is available to be installed using npm and yarn.

# npm
npm install @amplitude/plugin-session-replay-browser

# yarn
yarn add @amplitude/plugin-session-replay-browser

Usage

This plugin works on top of Amplitude Browser SDK and adds session replay features to built-in features. To use this plugin, you need to install @amplitude/analytics-browser version v1.9.1 or later.

This plugin requires that default tracking for sessions is enabled. If default tracking for sessions is not enabled in the config, the plugin will automatically enable it.

1. Import Amplitude packages

• @amplitude/analytics-browser
• @amplitude/plugin-session-replay-browser

import * as amplitude from '@amplitude/analytics-browser';
import { sessionReplayPlugin } from '@amplitude/plugin-session-replay-browser';

2. Instantiate Session Replay plugin

The plugin must be registered with the amplitude instance via the following code. The plugin accepts an optional parameter which is an Object to configure the plugin based on your use case.

amplitude.init(API_KEY);
const sessionReplayTracking = sessionReplayPlugin({
  sampleRate: undefined
});

Options

Name	Type	Default	Required	Description
sampleRate	number	undefined	Yes	Use this option to control how many sessions will be selected for replay collection. A selected session will be collected for replay, while sessions that are not selected will not. The number should be a decimal between 0 and 1, ie 0.01, representing the fraction of sessions you would like to have randomly selected for replay collection. Over a large number of sessions, 0.01 would select 1% of those sessions.
privacyConfig	object	undefined	No	Supports advanced masking configs with CSS selectors.
forceSessionTracking	boolean	false	No	If this is enabled we will force the browser SDK to also send start and end session events.
debugMode	boolean	false	No	Adds additional debug event property to help debug instrumentation issues (such as mismatching apps). Only recommended for debugging initial setup, and not recommended for production.
configServerUrl	string	No	undefined	Specifies the endpoint URL to fetch remote configuration. If provided, it overrides the default server zone configuration.
trackServerUrl	string	No	undefined	Specifies the endpoint URL for sending session replay data. If provided, it overrides the default server zone configuration.
shouldInlineStylesheet	boolean	No	true	If stylesheets are inlined, the contents of the stylesheet will be stored. During replay, the stored stylesheet will be used instead of attempting to fetch it remotely. This prevents replays from appearing broken due to missing stylesheets. Note: Inlining stylesheets may not work in all cases. If this is undefined stylesheets will be inlined.
storeType	string	No	idb	Specifies how replay events should be stored. idb uses IndexedDB to persist replay events when all events cannot be sent during capture. memory stores replay events only in memory, meaning events are lost when the page is closed. If IndexedDB is unavailable, the system falls back to memory.
performanceConfig.enabled	boolean	No	false	If enabled, event compression will be deferred to occur during the browser's idle periods.
performanceConfig.timeout	number	No	undefined	Optional timeout in milliseconds for the requestIdleCallback API. If specified, this value will be used to set a maximum time for the browser to wait before executing the deferred compression task, even if the browser is not idle.
experimental.useWebWorker	boolean	No	false	If the SDK should compress the replay events using a webworker.

3. Install plugin to Amplitude SDK

amplitude.add(sessionReplayTracking);

Privacy

By default, the session replay will mask all inputs, meaning the text in inputs will appear in a session replay as asterisks: ***. You may require more specific masking controls based on your use case, so we offer the following controls:

1. Unmask inputs

In your application code, add the class .amp-unmask to any input whose text you'd like to have unmasked in the replay. In the session replay, it will be possible to read the exact text entered into an input with this class, the text will not be converted to asterisks.

2. Mask non-input elements

In your application code, add the class .amp-mask to any non-input element whose text you'd like to have masked from the replay. The text in the element, as well as it's children, will all be converted to asterisks.

3. Block non-text elements

In your application code, add the class .amp-block to any element you would like to have blocked from the collection of the replay. The element will appear in the replay as a placeholder with the same dimensions.

4. Block elements by CSS selectors.

In the SDK initialization code, you can configure the SDK to block elements based on CSS selectors.

const sessionReplayTracking = sessionReplayPlugin({
  sampleRate: 0.01,
  privacyConfig: {
      blockSelector: ['.ignoreClass', '#ignoreId']
  }
});

Debugging

Using debugMode when developing locally

Since the Session Replay plugin only records and tags events when the page is in focus, this can sometimes be problematic when developing locally with the browser console open. If you are having issues with the replays not showing up (while your quota usage going up). Try turning setting debugMode:true to see if that helps with the issue.