Monitor Unreal Engine Game Performance with Application Metrics

Summary

Unreal Engine games frequently experience performance issues such as frame-rate drops, hitches, and network degradation that do not register as application crashes. To address the lack of live production telemetry, the Sentry Unreal SDK introduces automatic performance metrics. The integration periodically samples frame times, network health, active UObject counts, physical memory usage, and garbage collection pause durations across desktop, console, and Android platforms. Telemetry entries attach contextual hardware and environment attributes alongside trace IDs to connect aggregate latency spikes directly to underlying traces and spans. Enabled by default in Unreal SDK version 1.11.0, this telemetry provides developers with fleet-wide visibility into hardware-specific bottlenecks across game releases.

Context

Unreal Engine performance stats typically remain confined to local developer machines, leaving teams without visibility into in-the-wild player issues like frame drops, hitches, or network degradation that do not generate crash reports.

Approach / What changed

Sentry introduced automatic performance metrics in Unreal SDK 1.11.0, automatically sampling frame times, network health indicators, and engine stats such as memory and garbage collection pause duration with hardware and trace attributes.

Takeaways

• Sentry Unreal SDK captures frame times split across game thread, render thread, and GPU work time to identify subsystem bottlenecks.
• Performance telemetry is sampled at configurable intervals, defaulting to twice per second for frame time at 60 FPS, every 10 seconds for network metrics, and every 60 seconds for memory and UObject counts.
• Metrics include contextual attributes like GPU model, CPU core count, RAM, map name, and trace IDs, linking aggregate performance spikes directly to corresponding spans and errors.

Related reading

• Sentry · May 5, 2026

  Introducing Application Metrics: Track the signal, see the spike, jump to the trace

  Sentry launched Application Metrics to capture application signals without pre-aggregating counters or discarding high-cardinality attributes like user IDs, project IDs, and regions. The system supports counters, distributions, and gauges within the existing SDK while linking each metric event directly to trace IDs for integrated debugging. Engineers demonstrated the feature by troubleshooting a Session Replay failure that triggered silently when sessions exceeded 1,000 video segments. By instrumenting distributions for replay event counts with project and replay attributes, the team isolated seven affected occurrences, navigated to connected traces and log lines, and reproduced the issue. Application Metrics comes enabled in recent SDK versions with 5GB included per plan.

  Ben Coe

• Sentry · May 21, 2026

  The product analytics you already have