May 2018 Summaries

Sentry 9 aims to improve the relevance of information displayed in the platform, reducing time to resolution, while making issue fixing less annoying for developers and teams involved. The new ownership features focus on increasing control over who owns what in projects, allowing teams and individuals to take action with that ownership. This shift prioritizes ensuring issues end up in the right hands as quickly as possible, rather than blaming specific engineers or teams for problems. The platform has also introduced new rules for defining paths or URLs that are owned by users or teams, making it easier to manage issue ownership and reduce noise.

Sentry Raises $16 Million Series B from NEA and Accel to Expand Error Monitoring Capabilities into Application Performance Monitoring for Developers Sentry has raised an additional $16 million in funding from partners at NEA and Accel, marking a turning point for the company. With this new investment, Sentry plans to expand its capabilities beyond error monitoring to tackle broader application performance issues, including those that don't generate traditional errors or trigger visible errors. The company aims to use the same core principles and ideas that have made its error monitoring successful to address these problems, positioning itself as a leader in Application Performance Monitoring for Developers (APM). Sentry's mission is to provide peace of mind for developers by giving them the data points they need to quickly identify issues, such as code changes, and prevent bugs from reaching users. With the launch of Sentry 9, the company has introduced features like Suspect Commits, which enable developers to take ownership of their code changes and receive timely feedback on potential issues.

Introducing Sentry 9 Sentry 9 aims to reduce the time spent tracking down who should fix an issue by introducing features such as Owners, Teams, and Environments to clarify responsibility. This helps prioritize rapid iteration and streamline information seen by the team. The new Owners feature eliminates confusion and endless triage, while Teams enable collaboration and mention others in error reports or teams for speedy remediation. Sentry's Environments feature filters issues down to a specific stage in the development cycle, saving time sifting through inconsistent tags and messy data. Overall, Sentry 9 was designed to save time outside the workflow, allowing teams to focus on important tasks.

Sentry's Support Engineers play a crucial role in bridging the gap between support and engineering by compiling common issues and feature requests, working on them with more experienced engineers, and engaging with users to provide results. They contribute to engineering projects, such as improving the Audit Log, which requires collaboration with mentors and other engineers through pair programming sessions. This mentorship fosters personal and career growth, allowing Support Engineers to build on existing skills while gaining insight into the engineering process at Sentry. The work of a Support Engineer involves helping users self-diagnose issues, building processes and systems that aid both customers and internal teams, and providing detailed insight to customers without escalating issues to additional teams.

Kathryn Manuri, also known as Katie, is a front-end developer from Miami who moved to San Francisco after joining Google's Sales team. She spent 5 years there before returning to night school to pursue her passion for front-end development and later joined the Customer Success Team at Sentry. In her free time, she enjoys cooking duck confit, listening to music, and traveling with her pet bunny named Ninjin.

Sentry Scouts: Open Source - A Recap` The Sentry Scouts Meetup series is a gathering of software developers for software developers, focused on discussing the future of building and using software. The inaugural meetup in January 2018 explored experiences with open source, featuring a panel of knowledgeable guests and an audience eager to participate. Panelists emphasized the importance of resources, passion, and contribution in getting started with open source projects. They shared tips such as seeking out learning opportunities, finding personal interest in a project, and contributing small changes or non-code contributions. The event also highlighted the potential for open source projects to impact one's career, including securing job offers after contributing to a project.

The April 2018 Update (1803) of Windows 10 includes an upgrade to .NET Framework, bringing it up to version 4.7.2, which may cause issues with applications compiled for earlier versions of the framework. The issue arises when a `SqlConnection` object is instantiated while providing a connection string and the `ConnectionString` setter is subsequently called, causing a `NullReferenceException`. To work around this issue, developers can use a new instance of `SqlConnection` instead of reusing an existing one. Additionally, using .NET Core can provide protection against automatic framework updates and issues like this one, as it allows for side-by-side installations with no impact on older versions. Sentry, a dedicated exception monitoring tool, can help track and display detailed information about errors, including runtime and operating system versions, making it easier to diagnose and fix issues.

Sentry provides Spike Protection, a feature designed to prevent unexpected spikes in event volume from exceeding your monthly quota, which can occur when new bugs or unforeseen events impact your application, allowing you to maintain visibility and avoid quota loss.

The interview with Conor McDermottroe of CircleCI highlights the importance of learning from difficult infrastructure lessons. Conor shares his experiences with data-loss incidents and the need to test third-party tools before deploying them in production. He also discusses a specific issue with container networking that was overlooked during testing, resulting in significant downtime. Throughout the conversation, Conor emphasizes the value of perseverance and collective problem-solving in overcoming engineering challenges.

Introducing Sentry for Rust: A new SDK that allows Rust users to report panics, failures, and other incidents to Sentry, following the new API guidelines, with support for catching panics, logging failures, recording breadcrumbs, and shipping debug information. The SDK can be easily integrated into a project by adding it to Cargo.toml and using specific functions, such as `register_panic_handler` and `capture_error`. The Sentry team is available to answer questions and provide feedback through the API docs, forum, issue tracker, and support engineers.