March 2019 Summaries

Chaos Engineering is a practice used to make systems more resilient by intentionally introducing failures into them, allowing developers to identify and fix issues before they become critical. Tammy Butow, Principal SRE at Gremlin, emphasizes the importance of making Chaos Engineering accessible to all team members, from developers to operators, and providing tools that support this goal. The Gremlin platform is designed with safety, reliability, and security in mind, allowing users to quickly understand what Chaos Engineering experiments are scheduled to run and be empowered to run additional experiments in their local environment. To make Chaos Engineering work effectively in development workflows, Tammy recommends focusing on developer understanding, using monitoring and observability tools, sharing experiment results in code reviews, and automating experiments using the Gremlin API. By following these tips, developers can integrate Chaos Engineering into their daily workflow, making their systems more resilient and better equipped to handle real-world failures.

Danny Molina joins Sentry as a Business Development Representative, bringing his sales experience from Insightly to the company. He's also an avid fan of punk rock and soup, often incorporating these interests into his work. In this video, Danny provides an intro to Sentry's product tour, highlighting how the platform improves developer productivity by helping teams understand their broken code. With a unique approach that includes talking to strangers and getting meetings with potential clients, Danny aims to drive growth for Sentry.

Sentry recently experienced two minor outages related to database lock-contention, where a process waits for another shared resource it depends on, causing brief moments of unavailability. The issue was caused by a long-running query that affected the production database and billing system, leaving pending changes in an incomplete state. To identify the root cause, Sentry used its robust tagging and search infrastructure to find the original exception, which led to a dedicated database connection being used instead of the default one, causing excessive lock contention. The fix was to use the correct database connection, adding test coverage to prevent similar mistakes in the future and highlighting the importance of tracing critical context with tools like Breadcrumbs.

Congratulations to Frances Coronel, Open Source Lead at Techqueria and recipient of Sentry’s first-ever Open Source Grant! She has been working professionally as a developer since 2015 and has both a Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science. Her passions outside of work include contributing to open source, public speaking and mentoring other URMs in tech. She has been involved with Techqueria as an open source lead since 2018. Techqueria is a volunteer-run organization that aims to create spaces for career advice and development, events, conferences, and speaking opportunities among Latinx professionals in tech. Sentry's Open Source Grant will allow them to create a member portal that better engages their community through user profiles, job boards, and event calendars. The grant also reflects Techqueria's targeted approach toward inclusion and community-building in all of their projects. Eight other projects were also reviewed, including Distribute Aid, anemone, lollipop cloud, lufthaden, matterhorn, plots2, readthedocs, and EteSync, which demonstrate a wide range of innovative initiatives focused on open source development and community engagement.

Sentry has released new features that increase visibility into errors across organizations, and it also offers great integrations with various tools such as Jira, GitHub, GitLab, PagerDuty, Slack, and others to maximize visibility into errors. Two-way sync with Jira ensures essential information remains synced between Sentry and these apps, while the GitHub integration allows linking issues and resolving them via commit or pull request. The GitLab integration has been improved with release and commit tracking, and a direct integration is now available in GitLab projects. PagerDuty integrations enable sending alerts to specific types of errors or customers, and Slack notifications can be configured for organizations that set up alert rules. Additionally, Sentry provides data forwarding, Service Hooks, and a REST API to forward processed events to third-party providers, allowing for near-real-time updates and building custom features on top of Sentry data.

Nextcloud is an open-source platform that provides file sharing and communication services, along with various other features like calendar/contacts, project management, and more. It also offers over 200 integrations to extend its functionality, including error tracking with Sentry. The integration of Sentry into Nextcloud allows for the collection and aggregation of errors from Nextcloud in the Sentry web interface. This helps developers at Nextcloud find issues in betas, RCs, and stable releases that might not have been noticed otherwise. Sentry treats app IDs automatically assigned by the system logger as tags on its user interface, making it possible to filter tickets for specific apps. The platform also emphasizes security, with both Sentry and Nextcloud focusing on protecting user data and privacy.

Sentry's Unified PHP SDK provides a simple way to integrate error tracking into PHP applications, allowing developers to monitor and analyze errors in their code. To use the SDK, developers can install it using Composer and include a few lines of code to set up and configure the SDK. The SDK is designed to work with popular PHP frameworks like Laravel, providing a flexible and customizable solution for error tracking. With the SDK installed, developers can send unhandled errors and exceptions to Sentry, where they can be analyzed and used to improve their application's reliability and performance.

Sentry introduces new features that provide both macro- and micro-level perspectives on error trends and application health. Cross-project Issues allow navigation across multiple projects in a single view, while Events View presents raw error streams for better understanding of traces between projects or issues. New search capabilities include wildcards, negation, and advanced property searches. Discover is a query builder that helps uncover deeper insights, and Dashboards provide data visualization of errors throughout an organization. Improved navigation and persistent filters make it easier to find relevant data quickly. Some features are available on the Business plan, with trials offered for interested users.