Sentry
By Sentry
Sentry is an application monitoring platform that captures, aggregates, and helps developers triage errors, exceptions, and performance issues across web, mobile, and backend applications in real time.
Definition
Sentry is an application monitoring platform that captures, aggregates, and helps developers triage errors, exceptions, and performance issues across web, mobile, and backend applications in real time.
Overview
Sentry began as an internal tool at Disqus around 2012 and grew into a widely used error-tracking and application performance monitoring (APM) product, offered both as hosted SaaS and as a self-hostable open-source version. Lightweight SDKs installed in an application automatically capture unhandled exceptions, stack traces, and "breadcrumbs" — the sequence of events leading up to an error — sending them to Sentry's backend, where they're grouped into deduplicated "issues" and prioritized by frequency and impact. Sentry integrates with source maps and debug symbols so it can show original source code even for minified or compiled production builds, and it links errors to specific release versions, users, and deploys, often triggered directly from a GitHub Actions pipeline. Sentry complements infrastructure-focused monitoring tools like Prometheus and Grafana by focusing specifically on application-level errors and code-level performance traces rather than server metrics, and teams commonly route its alerts into channels in tools like Slack.
Key Features
- Automatic error capture with full stack traces and breadcrumbs
- Issue grouping and deduplication to cut through noisy alerts
- Release and deploy tracking to correlate errors with specific code changes
- Performance monitoring and tracing for slow transactions and bottlenecks
- SDKs for dozens of languages, frameworks, and mobile platforms
- Source map support for readable stack traces in minified production code