Understand Session Replay

Session Replay records real user sessions in your product and replays them alongside the events you track in Amplitude. Use it to understand why users hesitate, leave a funnel, or encounter problems in a product flow.

Use Session Replay to watch one user's experience. For an aggregate view of where users click, tap, and scroll across many sessions, use Heatmaps.

What a replay shows

When you watch a replay, you can follow the user's activity alongside an event timeline. Inspect clicks, navigation, and the context around an action to understand what an event count alone can't explain.

Error analytics exposes console logs and failed network requests. Frustration analytics highlights rage clicks and dead clicks. Each capability's guide states its SDK requirements.

Session matching connects captured replays with your analytics sessions so you can investigate the behavior behind a chart. If you define sessions with an event property, configure custom session matching. If your analytics pipeline doesn't send session IDs, configure time-based matching. Amplitude doesn't stitch one user's replays across multiple projects.

When to use Session Replay

• Improve conversions: Pair quantitative trends with recordings to form and test hypotheses about a workflow.
• Diagnose product issues: Review the session behind a reported bug to understand the user's experience.
• Identify behavior patterns: Create an analytics chart from replay events to check whether a session represents a broader trend.
• Review a new feature: Watch how customers use a newly launched flow without relying only on surveys.
• Collaborate on an investigation: Share a replay and discuss specific moments with teammates.

For a ranked view of issues across sessions, use Friction Monitor. The Session Replay Agent analyzes recordings at scale to surface friction, navigation patterns, and engagement insights.

Capture and privacy

Session Replay isn't enabled by default. Install Session Replay with an SDK or integration before you analyze recordings.

Privacy settings control which content Amplitude masks or excludes. Data lifecycle rules describe retention, deletion, and privacy requests. SDK references state capture limitations for each platform.

Open a replay

Find Session Replay in the left-hand sidebar in Amplitude Analytics. Find session replays explains how to open recordings from search, User Look-Up, charts, and your homepage.