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User Feedback Architecture

The goal of this doc is to give engineers an in-depth understanding of User Feedback's backend. It will:

  1. describe the relevant ingestion pipelines, data models, and functions.
  2. explain the difference between “feedback”, “user reports”, and “crash reports”, and why we built and need to support each.

Creation sources

When broken down, there are 5 ways to create feedback in our system 😵‍💫. (But 4 of them, related to user reports, are quite similar!) A good reference is the FeedbackCreationSource(Enum) in create_feedback.py. The 4 ways clients can create feedback are:

NEW_FEEDBACK_ENVELOPE: The new format created by the Replay team when adding the User Feedback Widget to the JavaScript SDK. It allows adding more information, for example tags, release, url, etc.

USER_REPORT_ENVELOPE: The older format with name/email/comments, that requires event_id to link a Sentry error event.

USER_REPORT_DJANGO_ENDPOINT: The Web API

CRASH_REPORT_EMBED_FORM: The crash report modal

How feedback is stored

On the backend, each feedback submission in Sentry's UI is an un-grouped issue occurrence, saved via the issues platform. The entrypoint is create_feedback_issue(), which

  1. filters feedback with empty or spam messages. Note anonymous feedbacks are not filtered (missing name and/or email).
  2. sends to issues pipeline in a standardized format. To make sure it is never grouped, we use a random UUID for the fingerprint.

Feedback events

The new and preferred way to send feedback from the SDK is in an event envelope. The format is the same as error events, except the type header = "feedback". While user reports have an associated event, new feedback is an event. This offers 2 improvements:

  1. Users can submit generic feedback without an error occurring. We're allowing users to catch things that Sentry can’t!
  2. Rather than waiting for the associated error to be ingested asynchronously, we immediately get access to context like the environment, platform, replay, user, tags...

The user's submission is wrapped in a context object:

Copied
event[”contexts”][”feedback”] = {
	"name": <user-provided>,
	"contact_email": <user-provided>,
	"message": <user-provided>,
	"url": <referring web page>,
	"source": <developer-provided, ex: "widget">
}

// all fields are technically optional, but recommended
// the widget can be configured to require a non-empty email and/or name
  • This doc refers to the payload format (event in the pseudo-code above) as a “feedback event”.
  • The feedback widget, which is installed by default, sends these envelopes.
  • API: for SDK v8.0.0+, we use the sendFeedback function.

Ingest diagram

diagram source

In Relay v24.5.1, we migrated feedback to its own kafka topic + consumer, ingest-feedback-events. This decouples risk and ownership from errors (ingest-events).


Attachments

We only use attachments for the widget’s screenshot feature, which allows users to submit at most 1 screenshot per feedback. Attachments are another item type in an envelope.

  • SDK v8.0.0+, Relay v24.5.1+: Sends the feedback and attachment items in the same envelope.
  • SDK < v8, all Relay versions: Sends a separate envelope for each item.

The feedback pipeline does not process attachments. Relay routes them to a separate topic and storage, and the UI makes a separate request for them.

User reports

The deprecated way of sending feedback is as a user report. This is a simple typed dict:

Copied
user_report = {
	"event_id": <required UUID str>,
	"email": <optional str>,
	"name": <optional str>,
	"comments": <optional str>,
}

Ingest diagram

diagram source


Shimming to feedback

Before it was extended to generic feedback, the UserReport model was first used for crash reports. Therefore an associated event ID is required, and we use it to set environment and group before saving the model to Postgres. Only then can we shim the report to a feedback event and pass it to create_feedback_issue().

If the event hasn’t reached eventstore (Snuba) by the time of ingest, we still save the report, but leave the environment + group empty and skip feedback creation.

To ensure the skipped reports eventually get fixed and shimmed, we added a post process job to the errors pipeline: link_event_to_user_report(). This is the 5th, automated way of creating feedback.

Simplified diagram: diagram source


Envelopes

User reports are also sent to Relay in envelope format. This item type is misleadingly called “user feedback” in some of our docs, but the item header will read "user_report".

The SDK function that sends these is captureUserFeedback.


Django endpoint

Before our envelope ingest service existed, older SDKs directly POST the report to Sentry, with /api/0/projects/{organization_id_or_slug}/{project_id_or_slug}/user-feedback/.

See https://docs.sentry.io/api/projects/submit-user-feedback/.


Crash reports

The crash report modal pops up when Sentry detects an error on the current page, prompting users to describe what happened. On the backend, crash report data is the same as user reports.

You can install it as an SDK integration.

We implement it as a Django view:

  • URL: /api/embed/error-page/
  • Python Class: error_page_embed.ErrorPageEmbedView

Crash reports are also shimmed to feedback. The pipeline is the same as the /user-feedback endpoint.

Sentry UI

diagram source

You can view the user reports related to a specific issue at the "User Feedback" tab of Issue Details. This excludes "new" feedback (anything sent from the widget).

Email alerts

Email alerts are triggered in feedback’s post process pipeline. (Unrelated to
the post process diagram above.) We apply some feedback-specific filters, skipping emails if:

  1. The feedback is marked as spam AND the organizations.user-feedback-spam-filter-actions feature flag is enabled.
  2. The source is NOT a new feedback envelope / the widget, AND the “Crash Report Notifications” setting is disabled.
    • in UI: Settings > Projects > (project slug) > User Feedback > “Enable Crash Report Notifications”
    • project option in code: sentry:feedback_user_report_notifications
    • default = true/enabled

Feature flags for self-hosted

To disable all UI features and/or ingestion, set these to false:

  • organizations:user-feedback-ui
  • organizations:feedback-visible
  • organizations:user-feedback-ingest

To disable auto spam filters, set these to false:

  • organizations:user-feedback-spam-filter-ingest
  • organizations:user-feedback-spam-filter-actions
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