Comment 4 for bug 1715434

My findings so far:

I think the transaction stuff is noise, per conversation in Slack. The "breadcrumbs" feature in Sentry seems to be just showing you some other events that are temporally adjacent in hopes that they give some useful context. In this case, they don't. The slew of 'txn.*' logging statements is just showing normal operation of the app. I see that the root logger is set to 'INFO'. We could set that to 'WARN' and get less noise. Or we can be more surgical and just set the 'txn' logger to 'WARN', and just shut up that noise.

That leaves the SAML error. I'm not sure why the subject here says 'Okta'--could be happening with Google or Okta, we don't really know. But that's neither here nor there.

The log.error statement that is triggering this is located in the 'get_identity' method of the SAML response object in the pyyaml library. Reading the code, it's not obvious to me what it's trying to do. It's also not obvious to me while we call it. I call it because the documentation for pyyaml showed it being called, but those docs are short on explication. The return value is not used, so presumably it's called for its side effects, but, reading the code, there are no obvious side effects. So it's possible we could shut this thing up by just not calling that method. Obviously we'd need to test and see if that actually works, which is not a cheap or easy proposition.

So, it comes down to how much we're willing to spend to de-noise Sentry, I guess, whether we should pursue this further. I don't see any evidence of a degraded user experience associated with this ticket.