Screenshots

Sentry makes it possible to automatically take a screenshot and include it as an attachment when a user experiences an error, an exception or a crash.

This feature is only available for SDKs with a user interface, like the ones for mobile and desktop applications. It's also limited by whether taking a screenshot is possible or not. For example, in some environments, like native iOS, taking a screenshot requires the UI thread, which often isn't available in the event of a crash. Another example where a screenshot might not be available is when the event happens before the screen starts to load. So inherently, this feature is a best effort solution.

Enabling Screenshots

Because screenshots may contain PII, they are an opt-in feature. You can enable screenshots as shown below:

<application>
  <meta-data
    android:name="io.sentry.attach-screenshot"
    android:value="true"
  />
</application>

Customize Screenshot Capturing

Because capturing screenshots can be a resource-intensive operation on Android, it's limited to one screenshot every 2 seconds using a debouncing mechanism. This behavior can be overruled if you supply a BeforeCaptureCallback for screenshots in the SentryAndroidOptions.

The BeforeCaptureCallback also allows you to customize the behavior based on event data, so you can decide when to capture a screenshot and when not to. For example, you can decide to only capture screenshots of crashed and fatal events:

import io.sentry.android.core.SentryAndroid;

SentryAndroid.init(this, options -> {
    options.setBeforeScreenshotCaptureCallback((event, hint, debounce) -> {
        // always capture crashed events
        if (event.isCrashed()) {
            return true;
        }

        // if debounce is active, skip capturing
        if (debounce) {
            return false;
        } else {
            // also capture fatal events
            return event.getLevel() == SentryLevel.FATAL;
        }
    });
});

Viewing Screenshots

If one is available, you'll see a thumbnail of the screenshot when you click on a specific issue from the Issues page.

Once you've clicked on the event ID of a specific issue, you'll be able to see an overview of all the attachments as well as associated events in the "Attachments" tab.