Sentry Review

David Cramer published Sentry as an open source side project in 2008 because getting at production logs meant asking a sysadmin nicely, and founded a company around it with Chris Jennings in 2012. The original idea still carries the product: do not hand a developer a log search box, hand them the exception. An SDK goes in, and within minutes there are stack traces with the offending line highlighted, the release and commit that introduced the regression, the trail of what the user clicked on the way in, and ten thousand identical failures collapsed into one issue.

Session replay shows you the session. Tracing shows you the slow span. Installation really is a few lines in almost any language or framework, and the free Developer tier will carry a side project indefinitely.

The complaint is the meter, and it is consistent enough to cost a grade. Sentry does not bill per seat, which is admirable, and bills instead for what your application emits, which is not something you control on the day things go wrong. Team is twenty six dollars a month and Business eighty on annual billing, each including fifty thousand errors, five million spans, fifty replays and five gigabytes of logs. Then a bad deploy loops an exception, pay as you go quietly absorbs the flood, and an invoice arrives at a number nobody budgeted for. Rate limits and per project quotas exist, and every experienced user sets them on the first day.

Still the right tool, and still the one that turns a vague bug report into a line number. Go and set the spend caps before you need them.