Unity performance integration guide

Step-by-step instructions for adding performance monitoring to your Unity projects.

The BugSnag Performance Unity integration automatically instruments Unity framework startups. Using our simple wrapper classes will instrument scene loads and network requests. Arbitrary operations can also be manually instrumented in your code.

Installation

To install the BugsnagPerformance SDK through the Unity Package Manager, go to Window → Package Manager and add the package from the following git URL:

https://github.com/bugsnag/bugsnag-unity-performance-upm.git

This will fetch the latest release available when the URL is added. To get a newer version in future builds, re-add the package. You can also specify an exact version using the git tag for the release after the URL:

https://github.com/bugsnag/bugsnag-unity-performance-upm.git#v1.2.0

Basic configuration

BugSnag will start automatically in your app once you have configured your API key through Window → Bugsnag → Performance Configuration:

If you are using the BugSnag Error Monitoring SDK, the API key and other common configuration options can either be shared or set separately.

You can find your API key in Project Settings from your BugSnag dashboard.

Starting BugSnag manually

If you’d like control over when BugSnag starts, uncheck “Start Automatically” in the Bugsnag Performance Configuration window. Then create a PerformanceConfiguration object, initialized from the Unity Editor, which can then be overridden in code:

var config = BugsnagPerformanceSettingsObject.LoadConfiguration();
config.ReleaseStage = "Production";
BugsnagPerformance.Start(config);

If you’d like to configure BugSnag further, check out the Configuration options reference.

Instrumenting app starts

BugSnag will automatically and detect the time it takes to start your game within the Unity framework. These timings are shown under the “App starts” tab in the BugSnag Performance dashboard.

To disable automatic instrumentation of app starts, or to control the point at which your app should be defined as started, see the AutoInstrumentAppStart configuration option.

Instrumenting scene loads

The BugSnag Performance SDK contains a wrapper of the Unity SceneManager class, named BugsnagSceneManager, that will capture the start and end of your scenes. These timings are shown under the “Scene loads” tab in the BugSnag Performance dashboard.

Simply use BugsnagSceneManager instead of SceneManager in your code:

BugsnagSceneManager.LoadScene("MyScene");

Instrumenting network requests

The BugSnag Performance SDK contains a wrapper of the Unity UnityWebRequest class, named BugsnagUnityWebRequest, that will capture the start and end of network requests made through it. These timings are shown under the “Network requests” tab in the BugSnag Performance dashboard.

Simply use BugsnagUnityWebRequest instead of UnityWebRequest in your code:

var request = BugsnagUnityWebRequest.Get("www.my-url.com");
request.SendWebRequest();

The NetworkRequestCallback configuration option allows you to control the data sent in these network request spans using a callback.

Sending custom spans

To send custom spans to BugSnag for any other operations you wish to measure, use BugsnagPerformance.StartSpan to start a span, and call the span’s End method to end the measurement:

var span = BugsnagPerformance.StartSpan("Login");
LoginApi.login();
span.End();

The spanOptions parameter allows you to customize some elements of the span’s behavior:

Reporting child-only spans

If a custom span is “first class”, its performance characteristics will be aggregated and shown in the “Custom” tab of the BugSnag dashboard. If the custom span is useful only for adding insight into the performance of its parent (through the waterfall diagram on the span instance page), you should set the IsFirstClass span option to false:

BugsnagPerformance.StartSpan("always-nested", new SpanOptions { IsFirstClass = false });

Controlling span hierarchies

When viewing a single instance of a span in the BugSnag dashboard, a waterfall diagram will show you that instance’s children and their children, and so on. This allows you to see in more detail where the time was spent, and aid diagnosing and fixing any problems. When creating your own spans, you can use the spanOptions parameter to control their parent-child relationships to produce a meaningfully representative hierarchy in your dashboard. See Maintaining span context for more information.

Start time override

By default, a span will use the current timestamp as its start time. However, you can use the StartTime span option to report spans that have already started by providing your own DateTimeOffset. You can also end a span with your own timestamp to provide a retrospective end time:

var activityStartTime = DateTimeOffset.UtcNow;
// Do some work
var activityEndTime = DateTimeOffset.UtcNow;

BugsnagPerformance.StartSpan("always-nested", new SpanOptions { StartTime = false }).end(activityEndTime);