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Overview

PlayerZero gives teams complete visibility into user experiences by automatically capturing full-context session recordings—including DOM snapshots, network calls, and console logs—alongside distributed traces and telemetry to pinpoint root causes. By combining this technical data with session replays and user journey analysis, teams eliminate back-and-forth between support and engineering, dramatically accelerating issue resolution. In this guide, we will walk through how to map a user-reported issue to its root cause by collecting key session details, locating the relevant replay, and analyzing both frontend events and backend traces.

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Prerequisites

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Source Control Management (Codebase)

Connect your codebase to PlayerZero enables PlayerZero to map runtime errors, traces, and sessions back to the exact lines of code in your repository.

→ To set this up, navigate to the SCM Setup Guide.

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Web SDK

Instrumenting your frontend with PlayerZero captures user actions, DOM snapshots, and network activity for full-session context. It bridges frontend events with backend telemetry when available.

→ To set this up, navigate to the Web SDK Setup Guide.

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Process

PlayerZero helps your team move faster by turning vague user reports into fully contextualized sessions, giving you a visual and technical snapshot of what went wrong and when.

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1. Gather Essential Details

To get started, collect the user’s name or email, the time or date of the issue, and a short description of what went wrong.

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2. Map the User’s Complaint to a Debug Session

Once you have the key user details, use PlayerZero to locate and explore the associated user session.

• Search for the user on the users page by name, email, or user ID.
• Find the relevant session by checking the activity timeline that matches the user’s report.

Each session in PlayerZero has a three-pane interface: actions on the left, DOM replay in the middle, and network/dev context on the right. Use this to pinpoint the exact moment the user encountered the issue.

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3. Investigate Technical Traces

Review technical data around the time of the issue to understand root causes in the frontend or backend systems.

• Look for network traffic with 4xx or 5xx status codes and examine response payloads for error messages.
• Use OpenTelemetry traces to see backend service calls, switching to the Traces or Logs view to investigate the flow of the request.

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Summary and Next Steps

This guide demonstrated how PlayerZero integrates session data and OpenTelemetry traces to accelerate debugging without relying on back-and-forth between teams. This approach provides a reproducible method for isolating and understanding failures in distributed systems. For further implementation details, refer to the resources below.

Trace Errors to Code – Explains how to associate user complaints with exact sessions and trace those events across system layers.

Generate Code Fixes – Details how PlayerZero surfaces contextual suggestions based on trace data and system behavior.