

Sentry, The (Now Profitable) Bug Tracker Gets A Huge Makeover - bentlegen
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/05/sentry-the-now-profitable-bug-tracker-used-by-disqus-pinterest-rdio-path-more-gets-a-huge-makeover/

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zeeg
I'd be curious to hear if any HN readers are using Sentry and how they like
the service. We started as primarily Python based, so it's especially
interesting if you're using it for another language/platform.

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justinlilly
We're using it at <http://sprint.ly/> . In general, I like it.

I wish...

    
    
      - I could search w/ meaningful results
      - I could group by exception type.
      - I had a better method of seeing the different input data that caused the exception (without next/next/nexting).
      - there were lots more information around my source code.
    

I could probably come up with a few more if I were pressed to. All that said,
we'll continue to pay for the service b/c its useful to our business.

~~~
bruth
I second the need to have a view that shows the exception group and displays
the differences between input data. I use it extensively with other log levels
and treat it as a log aggregator (especially for INFO). However, it's really
hard to view the _variables_ within the input data which is necessary for any
entries that are not one-off exceptions. Otherwise it's a wonderful service.

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samarudge
We use the Sentry open-source edition

> "The cost of running and deploying your own server just to monitor the
> errors maintenance in your application for a lot of users isn’t really
> practical – there’s a lot of and cost involved with maintenance and upkeep"

I don't really understand this, we just stick it on our app/db servers
alongside our other applications. The cost is $0 and it takes about 5 mins to
set up, it's just a Django app.

~~~
zeeg
It quickly becomes expensive if you're routinely sending a measurable amount
data to it.

Disqus has two physical servers dedicated to it. Both of them are larger than
any of the web/worker machines getsentry.com runs. On top of those costs, they
also have the upkeep cost of running those servers, doing software upgrades,
and, if anything goes wrong, debugging things.

Obviously Disqus isn't a great example, since we built the software and know
how to run it, but companies much smaller than Disqus don't really have the
reason to invest the money or time into setting up infrastructure to support
it.

Delicious is using Sentry on their new JavaScript-centric site, and for the
amount of data they're sending, they'd be spending a lot more on hosting costs
and infrastructure maintenance. It's not ideal for everyone (some companies
push a lot of data through Sentry), and we don't necessarily aim to serve
someone who may be sending millions of events in a day.

What we typically see is that most people are sending somewhere between 5,000
and 50,000 events, which is right about the size where it's not practical to
host the instance yourself. It definitely beats maintaining RabbitMQ, Redis,
Memcache, Celery, WSGI, Postgres, and soon, Elastic Search.

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sente
I've played with the hosted service as well as hosting Sentry myself. I only
played with the latter version for 20 minutes but I didn't know how to get it
up and running such that I could actually use it in the same way the
getsentry.com was. (this was last week, before the UI redesign)

Is there something obvious I was missing?

This all being said, I'm very impressed with exception reporting at
getsentry.com!

~~~
sente
Got it working now

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akurilin
How does Sentry compare to Bitbucket or Github's bug tracking experiences?

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hcarvalhoalves
It's not a _bug tracker_ , as in tickets. It logs exceptions and debug
messages from your application.

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Cogito
The term _bug tracker_ initially threw me as well. For me at least, this term
is safely ensconced as equivalent to 'ticket management' in the domain of
software development.

I'm not sure what the best term for this other kind of "bug tracking", but
almost certainly it should be something else.

Maybe something like "live bug analytics"?

~~~
zeeg
Agree completely. Hard to editorialize something very well when it's on
TechCrunch :)

We'd also rename service to platform, as an example

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Mahn
Is there a demo somewhere to play with? I'd like to give it a look.

~~~
zeeg
There's not, but you can check out this public event from our JavaScript
client:

[https://app.getsentry.com/sentry/sentry-js-
test/group/323091...](https://app.getsentry.com/sentry/sentry-js-
test/group/3230916/)

(This was recorded before we annotated sourcemap data, but the original error
here was actually in a minified javascript file)

Also, of note, there's some things that don't fully function when you're
viewing a public event without full access. One of those things happens to be
the graph on that link.

