Search specification

Overview

This topic explains how to use LaunchDarkly’s observability search feature to query and filter data across your application. The search functionality allows you to find specific sessions, errors, logs, and traces by composing queries with different properties and attributes.

Compose search queries

Compose your search query with one or more expressions. Each expression can be a comparison between a key and a value, or a logical combination of other expressions.

Here are some examples of search queries:

span_name=gorm.Query

Enter a search value without a key to search on a default key. For logs, the default key is the message, and for traces it is the span_name.

gorm.Query

You can also filter for custom attributes you send in sessions, logs, and traces.

user_id=42

Keys and values

Keys are identifiers, which can include any combination of alphanumeric characters, underscores (_), periods (.), dashes (-), and wildcards, which are indicated by asterisks (*).

Values are strings with any character. To use spaces or special characters, you must enclose the string in quotes (", ').

You can use wildcards (*) in values to match on part of a pattern. For example:

• span_name=gorm.* matches all span_name values that start with gorm.
• span_name=*.Query matches all span_name values that end with .Query
• span_name=*orm* matches all values that contain orm

If you want to use a value with a space or special character, you must wrap the value in quotations.

tag="*query error*"
visited-url="https://app.launchdarkly.com/*"

Regex expressions

You can search with regex expressions by using the matches query operator: =\[your regex here]\. For example:

• clickTextContent=/\w.+\w/ matches all clickTextContent that start and end with any word
• browser_version=/\d\.\d\.\d/ matches all browser_versions in the form [0-9].[0-9].[0-9]

If you want to use a regex expression with a space or special character, you must wrap the value in quotations. For example:

• tag="/\w \w/"
• visited-url="/https://app.launchdarkly.com/\d/.+/"

Comparisons

Use operators to compare two different elements in your search query. The following operators are supported:

• =: Equals
• !=: Does not equal
• <: Less than
• <=: Less than or equal to
• >: Greater than
• >=: Greater than or equal to

Exist and does not exist

You can search if a key exists or does not exist with the exists operator. For example, to return all the traces with a connected session, use the following query:

secure_session_id exists

exists also works with the not keyword. For example, when you only want the root level spans when searching traces, use this query:

parent_span_id not exists

You can combine expressions with the logical operators AND, OR, and NOT:

• AND: Both expressions must be true
• OR: At least one of the expressions must be true
• NOT: The following expression must be false

There is an implicit AND between all filters unless you specify an OR directly. For example:

service_name=private-graph span_name=gorm.Query

This is equivalent to:

service_name=private-graph AND span_name=gorm.Query

You can also use parentheses ( AND ) to group values in an expression. For example:

(key1=value1 AND key2=value2) OR key3=value3

You can also use parentheses to group values in an expression:

service_name=(private-graph OR public-graph)

Saved searches

Saved searches are a set of search filters that apply to sessions or errors. Saved searches are useful if you want to quickly view sessions or errors that relate to a certain population of your users.

To save a search, click the Save button below the search bar.

Session-specific searching

When you search on the Sessions page, the following behaviors apply by default:

• The Sessions page displays completed sessions that have been fully processed. This is equivalent to searching by completed=true. You can use completed=false to find live sessions and sessions that are not yet fully processed.
• The key is assumed to include the end user’s identifier and location. This could be the end user’s email, device_id, or given identifier, as well as their city or country. For example, if you enter an expression without a key, such as search-term, then LaunchDarkly automatically expands that to email=*search-term* OR city=*search-term*.

Additionally, by default, the session replay SDK plugin automatically injects several attributes, to provide additional help with searching for sessions. To learn more, read Session replay.

Search by end user clicks

When you search on the Sessions page, you can search for sessions where an end user clicked a certain HTML element:

• clickSelector looks at the HTML element’s target’s selector, concatenating the element’s tag, id, and class values.
• clickTextContent looks at the HTML element’s target’s textContent property. Only the first 2000 characters are considered.

Here is an example:

clickSelector=svg
clickTextContent="Last 30 days"

Search by visited URL

When you search on the Sessions page, you can search for sessions where an end user visited a particular URL, using the visited-url filter. Use quotations around the value for this search to avoid any errors due to special characters in the the URL.

Here’s how:

visited-url="https://app.example.com/"

As with other filters, you can use contains and matches regex expressions with visited-url. The following example retrieves all sessions where the end user visited the “sessions” page:

visited-url=*sessions*
visited-url=/.+\d/sessions.+/

Configure error views

You can configure the Errors page to display different subsets of errors. Use the date dropdown to select a time range, and search in the search bar to filter the errors.