Sentry in Six Minutes

Sentry

18 Jul 202306:17

Summary

TLDRCentury is a comprehensive application monitoring platform that offers code-level observability, enabling developers from top companies like Disney and Cloudflare to track performance and errors. With simple integration, it groups similar events into issues, reduces noise, and focuses on critical problems. Advanced features like trace navigation, error pinpointing, session replay, and customizable alerts streamline the development workflow. Sentry's performance metrics and visualization tools help optimize app performance and monitor release health, providing a holistic view of application data for informed business decisions.

Takeaways

🌐 Century provides comprehensive application monitoring, coding health, and performance tracking services.
🔍 It offers code-level observability for numerous renowned companies like Disney, Peloton, Cloudflare, and Eventbrite, among others.
📈 Century processes billions of events monthly from popular products, ensuring robust monitoring capabilities.
🚀 Getting started with Century is straightforward; users can create a project and integrate monitoring frameworks easily.
🔑 The initialization method is copied into the code, enabling automatic error and performance event tracking.
🔍 Similar events are grouped into issues based on best-in-class fingerprinting to reduce noise and focus on critical problems.
📊 The issues page allows quick identification and filtering of issues, with detailed insights for effective triaging.
🌐 Trace Navigator visualizes distributed traces between front-end and back-end, correlating errors for better debugging.
🏷️ Sentry tags provide additional context and are useful for setting up queries, dashboards, and tailored alerts.
🎥 Session replay offers a video-like reproduction of user sessions to understand the context around errors or performance issues.
📊 Dashboards provide a customizable overview of application health, allowing navigation through error and performance data across multiple projects.

Q & A

What does Century do for application monitoring?
-Century provides code level observability for applications, enabling developers to see clearer, solve issues quicker, and learn continuously about their applications from the front end to the back end.
Which well-known companies use Century's services?
-Some of the world's best known companies like Disney, Peloton, Cloudflare, Eventbrite, Slack, and Rockstar Games use Century for their application monitoring needs.
How many events does Century process each month?
-Century processes billions of events each month from the world's most popular products.
How easy is it to get started with Century?
-Getting started with Century is super simple. After creating a Century organization, you can head over to create a project, pick from dozens of frameworks, decide if you want alerts, assign a name and a team, and copy the resulting initialization method into your code.
How does Century group similar events?
-Century groups similar events into issues based on best-in-class fingerprinting. This helps reduce noise and focus on the most important problems.
What features does the issues page provide?
-The issues page allows you to quickly see your issues and filter by properties like browser, device, impacted users, or whether an error is unhandled.
How does Sentry help in identifying the cause of an issue?
-Sentry surfaces the suspect commit that caused the issue when instrumented in both the front end and back end. It also provides tags for additional context, which are usable across Sentry and can be helpful when setting up queries, dashboards, and tailored alerts.
What does the stack trace show?
-The stack trace shows the specific line of code where the event occurred, along with the ability to link to that same line of code within GitHub.
How does session replay help in understanding user sessions?
-Session replay shows a video-like reproduction of user sessions, allowing you to see what happened before, during, and after an error or performance issue occurred.
What is the purpose of the transaction summary page?
-The transaction summary page provides a detailed view of transactions that have had significant changes in their performance over time, including graphs, instances of these events, stats, facet maps, related errors, and more.
How does Century's dashboard feature help in monitoring application health?
-Century's dashboards provide a customizable overview of your application's health by allowing you to navigate through error and performance data across multiple projects. Dashboards are made up of one or more widgets which can be created in the dashboard view or discovered in the same view, reflecting the project, environment, and date range noted in the toolbar.
What are the three ways to visualize Sentry data mentioned in the script?
-The three ways to visualize Sentry data are: 1) The releases page, which provides a visualization of your release, 2) The Discover tool, which provides visibility to your atomic data across environments, and 3) Sentry dashboards, which offer a customizable overview of your application's health.

Outlines

00:00

🚀 Introduction to Century's Application Monitoring

This paragraph introduces Century, a platform focused on monitoring application code health and performance. It highlights Century's capabilities in providing code-level observability, enabling developers to see, solve, and learn continuously about their applications. The script mentions several renowned companies like Disney, Peloton, Cloudflare, Eventbrite, Slack, and Rockstar Games that use Century's services. It emphasizes the platform's ability to process billions of events monthly and its ease of use, allowing developers to integrate monitoring into their projects by adding an initialization method into their code. The paragraph also discusses how Century groups similar events into issues to reduce noise and focus on significant problems, and how it uses best-in-class fingerprinting to aid in this process.

05:00

🔍 Advanced Features and Data Visualization in Century

The second paragraph delves into Century's advanced features, including the Discover tool, which provides cross-environment visibility of atomic data and allows users to query and gain insights into their system's health. It introduces the Discover Query Builder, which enables users to create custom queries and aggregations for specific questions related to error context or custom performance metrics. The paragraph also talks about Century's dashboards, which offer a customizable overview of an application's health across multiple projects. Dashboards consist of widgets that can be created or discovered within the platform, and they allow users to zoom in on time series visualizations. The script concludes by encouraging users to set up a project with Century, initialize its monitoring in their app, and reach out to the Century team with any questions.

Mindmap

Keywords

💡Application Monitoring

Application Monitoring refers to the process of observing and analyzing the performance and health of software applications. In the context of the video, Century provides a platform for monitoring applications from the front end to the back end, allowing developers to gain insights and quickly address issues. This is crucial for ensuring smooth user experiences and maintaining high-quality service.

💡Code Level Observability

Code Level Observability is the ability to see and understand what is happening within the code of an application. It allows developers to track the execution of their code, identify errors, and optimize performance. In the video, Century offers this level of detail to its users, providing a clear view into the inner workings of their applications and helping them to solve problems faster and more effectively.

💡Initialization Method

The Initialization Method refers to the process of setting up and configuring a system or application for use. In the context of the video, it is the method by which developers integrate Century's monitoring tools into their applications. By copying and pasting the initialization method into their code, developers can enable Century to automatically send performance events and errors, which is a critical step in monitoring and improving application health.

💡Event Grouping

Event Grouping is the practice of aggregating similar events to reduce noise and focus on the most critical issues. This process helps in organizing and prioritizing the information that monitoring tools collect, making it easier for developers to identify and address problems. In the video, Century groups similar events into issues based on best-in-class fingerprinting, which helps developers to concentrate on the most important issues affecting their applications.

💡Issue Page

The Issue Page is a feature within Century's platform that provides a centralized location for developers to view, analyze, and manage issues related to their applications. It offers a quick overview of issues, allowing developers to filter and sort them based on various properties. This page is essential for effective issue tracking and triaging, as it helps developers understand the scope and impact of problems and take appropriate action.

💡Trace Navigator

Trace Navigator is a tool that enables developers to visualize and analyze the flow of transactions and requests within their applications, particularly in distributed systems. It helps identify performance bottlenecks and errors by showing the path that a request takes through different services and components. In the context of the video, Century's Trace Navigator allows developers to see the distributed trace between the front end and back end, providing a comprehensive view of how issues affect the entire system.

💡GitHub Integration

GitHub Integration refers to the connection between Century's platform and the GitHub repository hosting service, which allows for seamless collaboration and version control. This integration enables developers to link code changes directly to issues and performance events, making it easier to identify the source of problems and collaborate on fixes. In the video, it is mentioned that Sentry surfaces the suspect commit that caused an issue, demonstrating how this integration streamlines the development process.

💡Session Replay

Session Replay is a feature that allows developers to review a recorded video-like reproduction of user sessions. This tool helps in understanding the user experience by showing exactly what happened before, during, and after an error or performance issue. It provides valuable insights into how issues impact users and assists in recreating and fixing这些问题.

💡Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are a feature that provides a historical timeline leading up to an event or issue within an application. They offer context by recording actions and events that precede an error, making it easier for developers to understand the sequence of events that led to the problem. In the video, Century's breadcrumbs are described as totally customizable, allowing developers to tailor the information they receive for effective issue tracking and resolution.

💡Automated Issue Assignment

Automated Issue Assignment is a process where monitoring tools automatically assign issues to the appropriate team or individual for resolution. This streamlines the workflow for developers by reducing the time spent on manual issue triage and allocation. In the context of the video, Century enables seamless continuation of the developer workflow by automating issue assignment, which helps improve efficiency and response times.

💡Performance Metrics

Performance Metrics are quantitative measures used to assess the efficiency, speed, and overall performance of an application. These metrics provide insights into how well an application is functioning and can help identify areas for improvement. In the video, Century's platform measures dozens of metrics like throughput and latency for various types of apps, giving developers a clear picture of their application's performance and aiding in the decision-making process for optimization.

Highlights

Century is a platform that monitors application code health and performance.

Developers can utilize Century to see issues more clearly, solve problems quicker, and learn continuously about their applications.

Century provides code level observability for front end to back end monitoring for major companies like Disney, Peloton, Cloudflare, Eventbrite, Slack, and Rockstar Games.

Each month, Century processes billions of events from the world's most popular products.

Getting started with Century is straightforward, requiring only the creation of an organization and a project.

Developers can choose from dozens of frameworks to start monitoring and integrate Century into their code.

Similar events are grouped into issues based on best-in-class fingerprinting to reduce noise and focus on important problems.

The issues page allows quick visibility of issues and filtering by properties such as browser, device, impacted users, or error handling status.

Issue details page provides information about the latest event and summarizes issue statistics like occurrence rates and first/last seen times.

Trace Navigator in Sentry allows visualization of distributed traces between front end and back end, and identification of correlated errors.

Sentry's GitHub integration surfaces the suspect commit that caused an issue and provides tags for additional context and customization.

Web projects can leverage session replay for a video-like reproduction of user sessions to understand the context of errors or performance issues.

Breadcrumbs offer customizable and historical timelines leading up to an error event.

Automated issue assignment helps continue the seamless developer workflow within Sentry.

Alerts provide a real-time method to notify developers of specific errors or performance problems via email, Slack, Teams, or webhook.

Sentry measures application performance with dozens of metrics like throughput and latency for web, mobile, and back-end apps.

The transview feature surfaces transactions with significant performance changes over time for further investigation.

Custom tags enable visualization of a heat map on the Sentry dashboard for in-depth analysis of application performance.

Sentry's dashboards offer a customizable overview of an application's health across multiple projects and various metrics.

The Discover tool and query builder in Sentry provide the ability to create custom queries and aggregations for specific insights into error context or custom performance metrics.

The releases page in Sentry offers a visualization of new issues, regressions, and the health and adoption rate of newly deployed apps.