
Real-time crash reporting tool Sentry raises $9M - termostaatti
https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/23/real-time-crash-reporting-tool-sentry-grabs-9-million-from-nea-accel
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pilif
_sigh_ \- I really love sentry to bits. Very responsive support, all open
source code, nice user interface, no nagging for additional services and very
fair price (to the point where it's much cheaper to just host with them rather
than trying to self-host, despite the thing being extremely well documented
and fully supported for self-hosting).

I wonder what we'll lose first before they will eventually be sold to get the
money back for the investors :(

Yes. I'm cynical, but it's always the same path in which good products
eventually are shut down or get way too expensive.

On the other hand, I would be extremely happy if it was Sentry to prove to the
world that you can in-fact take $9M in investment as an Open Source project
and still stay independent, keep your original values and not be shut down by
an eventual buyer.

~~~
zeeg
David here, founder, CEO, and extremely stubborn with my perspective. To echo
what Armin and others are saying, we're going to prove that you can build a
company around an open source product without turning it into crippleware.
There will be things that end up closed source (there already are, like our
billing code), but Sentry itself won't be one of them. We're in a fortunate
position in that we've been an established (albeit, small) business for a
number of years now, so we're able to build off of that existing success and
good will.

~~~
sytse
Great answer David. At GitLab we self host Sentry and love the product. I
understand that pilif has reservations, some open source projects prioritized
profit over stewardship after raising money. What we did at GitLab is write
down how we think about this in
[https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship](https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship)
You may or may not want to do something like that at some point. Anyway, lots
of success with Sentry, the product is great and the upcoming features sound
awesome.

~~~
zeeg
Huge props to GitLab. Definitely ahead of us organizationally, but one of the
few companies that I pay attention to in the space that seems to be similarly
aligned.

~~~
sytse
Thanks for the kind words Zeeg. Please let me know anytime we can help with
anything.

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nodesocket
$10 says the guy in the Christmas sweater is Ops/DevOps (I'm DevOps myself).
:-) lol

The length of the beard is proportional to ops experience.

~~~
Reedx
Funny, what is it about DevOps that either attracts or grows beards?

~~~
niftich
The lack of time to shave from continuously-deploying the code to make the
alert dashboard stop blinking yellow.

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kwikiel
I love sentry and i like mitsuhiko projects: flask, jinja2 and werkzeug.
Sentry substantially improved error handling and realiability in my startup

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Cyph0n
Congratulations guys! When I read that CCP Games was using Sentry on the PS3
for their multiplayer game Dust 514, I was pretty damn impressed.

Armin working there is what sealed the deal though - I've been following his
work since I discovered Flask a few years back.

Long story short, I will be using Sentry for my next web app.

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encoderer
I had the pleasure of meeting Cramer and his team last year at their office
and left convinced these guys are very talented. I look forward to seeing what
they can do with $9 mill.

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nawitus
I think the biggest problem with Sentry is that it will sample exceptions (I
wonder if there's a way to switch this off with $$$?), meaning that I can't
rely on it to view and examine every instance. Sometimes you need to fix
things manually which requires every exception to be saved.

Since I want to get every single exception logged, Sentry feels quite useless
and I wouldn't select it for my next project.

Other than that it has been a fantastic tool.

~~~
zeeg
We're working on improving this. It's a tradeoff we made early on as our
primary customers have always been very large tech companies (meaning lots of
errors). In those cases individual events have little to no meaning, and what
you really care about is the aggregate view.

That's very different than if e.g. you're a payments provider, and you
literally need to know every transaction that erred, but that's also quite a
different use case. In my opinion, you'd want to guarantee those errors are
logged elsewhere (traditional audit logs), and utilize Sentry primarily for
the workflow and alerting features.

~~~
nawitus
But if I need another tool for logging those errors, I could use the same tool
for both use cases, which would make Sentry unnecessary?

Ideally speaking a Sentry exception is the last escape hatch - if we can't
handle something in code at least the error is sent somewhere so that
developers can handle the issue. Following this the philosophy I'd like to
follow is that every time I get a Sentry exception, I'll make a new ticket in
Jira "handle error x, see link to Sentry", and ultimately there wouldn't be
any errors sent to Sentry.

~~~
thedz
FWIW my company uses both Splunk and Sentry, I've found myself using them to
combo together quite nicely

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js2
I've built a mobile crash-reporting solution around self-hosted Sentry. (To my
chagrin, I've been unable to open-source the bits I built around Sentry.)
Sentry is a great product and David et al are a great team. I'm hoping them
continued success.

~~~
daniel_levine
You should just come work at Sentry!

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tbarbugli
Been using Sentry since early versions (even contributed some crappy plugins
myself) and moved to hosted service immediately. Great tool, I am glad to hear
this news!

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sjs382
Hah! I used to own this domain, planning to use it as a tool for uptime
monitoring and statistics. I'm glad that someone else is making real use of
it!

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sosedoff
Great news! We've been using hosted Sentry for a while (couple of years) and
it works really well for its price. Highly recommended. P.S Has anyone tried
Golang support yet?

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akurilin
Congrats! How do you all feel this compares to TrackJS?

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zeeg
TrackJS is only JavaScript, whereas Sentry is cross-platform. In many cases a
niche single language service works very well, but specifically for Browser
JavaScript we go above and beyond most implementations and it's one of our
strongest offerings.

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xorgar831
Good for them!

On a side note, GCE has a similar feature with Stackdriver:
[https://cloud.google.com/error-
reporting/docs/viewing](https://cloud.google.com/error-reporting/docs/viewing)

~~~
gtaylor
It's not really the same thing. Sentry is far more general purpose, and
doesn't require GCE. If your language or framework lacks support, you can add
it. Also has a bunch more functionality.

Google's offering is great on App Engine (I've used it a good bit), but that's
the sweet spot.

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tegansnyder
Congrats David and Team!

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Negative1
How is this compared to Apteligent/Crittercism?

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zeeg
The best way to understand the differences is to try it out. I haven't used
either of these tools personally, so my comments are more general.

We focus on giving you an extremely rich crash report and day-to-day workflow
tools, whereas often other tools are more about high-level passive analytics.
Additionally we work cross platform (web, mobile, and desktop), and go much
deeper than most things that simply aggregate logs.

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andrewmlevy
I'm the co-founder of Apteligent. David, I'm surprised you would describe our
solution as "high level passive analytics" unless you haven't tried it
yourself.

I would say the difference is our deep focus on mobile user experience vs
Sentry's focus on cross platform error reporting. To understand your users
this also means you need more data than just crash. For example: app load
times, network data, UI latency, etc.

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zeeg
Apologies (edited), I meant to suggest that other solutions are generally
that. I definitely haven't used Apteligent (or Crittercism), but things like
New Relic (which from a glimpse of screenshots, seemed similar), I would label
as passive systems.

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nikcub
congrats guys

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chriskjennings
Thanks Nik!

