September 2019 Summaries

Sentry is a platform that helps developers detect and fix crashes in their native applications. It provides a client library for capturing crash reports and sending them to its servers, which can be integrated into existing projects or built from scratch using the Sentry Native SDK. The SDK comes in three distributions (standalone, Crashpad, and Breakpad) and allows users to add context information such as breadcrumbs, custom messages, and user data to their events. To process crash reports, Sentry requires debug information, which can be uploaded using sentry-cli or other tools. The platform also provides symbol servers for matching debug files with crashes, grouping events into issues, and reducing noise with custom grouping rules. Additionally, it offers source context by uploading sources to its servers. With the Sentry Native SDK, developers can now get first-class error monitoring for their native applications, allowing them to squash bugs quickly and improve user experiences.

Fixing Native Apps with Sentry` is a guide on how to integrate Sentry, an error tracking tool, into native applications. The guide explains the process of choosing the right client, adding context information for debugging, providing debug information, reducing noise with custom grouping, and using source context. It aims to help developers detect crashes, fix issues quickly, and improve their application's overall quality.

Sentry, an open-source error monitoring platform, has raised $40 million in Series C funding to accelerate product development and marketing efforts. The company aims to rethink application performance monitoring (APM) by addressing the growing need for monitoring software that runs on customer devices, such as mobile apps and IoT devices. With the rise of JavaScript-based Single Page Applications (SPAs), Sentry plans to push innovation in the application space, providing holistic application monitoring and actionable insights to developers. The company's vision is to empower developers to debug native applications faster with alerts, context, and root-cause analysis, while emphasizing its focus on making developers' lives easier. With this funding, Sentry will continue to grow its team and expand its product offerings, aiming to become the market-leading error monitoring platform for developers building better software, faster.

Sentry for Native extends error monitoring capabilities to support native applications, providing developer teams with rich insights into application health to quickly fix software errors. The new platform features seamless integration with existing tools and repositories, direct visibility into root cause, and intelligent grouping of crashes into unique issues. This update aims to provide a modern, holistic application monitoring platform that gives developers context beyond symptom display.

Sentry Extends Best-in-Class Error Monitoring for Native Applications Application crashes significantly impact customer experience, affecting company reputation and revenue. Developer teams need rich insights into application health to fix software errors with minimal impact. Sentry for Native provides a complete offering for native projects, allowing developers to debug faster with alerts, context, and root-cause analysis. Existing applications can directly integrate with Sentry using Breakpad, Crashpad, or Windows APIs, while the new Native SDK offers an easier way to add crash reporting. Sentry integrates seamlessly into existing processes and tools, providing direct visibility into root cause with symbolicated stack traces, API-rich context, and application source code.

Sentry is an open-source error monitoring platform that has evolved into a market-leading solution for developers to build better software, faster. With over 50,000 active organizations using its cloud-hosted service, Sentry has helped millions of developers and grown to nearly 100 employees across multiple offices. The company's co-founder, Max Kanat-Alexander, believes the next frontier in application development is the frontend, with mobile apps and browser-based applications becoming increasingly important. However, current APM solutions do not address the needs of these newer platforms, leading Sentry to rethink its approach and focus on providing holistic application monitoring that addresses issues before they become problems. Recently, Sentry raised $40 million in Series C funding from Accel and NEA to accelerate product development and marketing efforts, with plans to introduce new features such as improved crash reporting for mobile applications later this year.

Azure Key Vault provides a secure way to store and access secrets in ASP.NET Core applications running on App Service or Azure Functions. To use Azure Key Vault with an ASP.NET Core app, developers can add specific NuGet packages, get the URL of the Vault, create their client ID and secret, connect to the vault, and read settings. However, this process is not trivial and requires several steps. A simpler way to consume secrets from Key Vault is by using Azure Key Vault references, which allows referencing secrets directly in app settings without changing code. To use Azure Key Vault references, developers need to create a Key Vault, add a secret (connection string) to it, get the "reference" of their secret, and then configure the access policy for the App Service to access the Key Vault. The process also requires creating a system-assigned identity for the App Service to access the Key Vault securely. Once everything is set up, developers can reference secrets from Key Vault directly in app settings without changing code. However, there are limitations to using Azure Key Vault references, such as requiring the use of the whole secret URL with the version at the end and being still in preview.

This summary highlights the integration of Azure Key Vault and Sentry for securing ASP.NET Core applications. By leveraging Azure Key Vault, developers can securely store and manage sensitive settings such as API keys and connection strings, while Sentry provides error tracking and monitoring capabilities to help identify issues with these secure settings. The post explains how to configure Key Vault references in an ASP.NET Core app hosted on App Service or Azure Functions, allowing for seamless integration of secure settings without requiring code changes. It also discusses limitations, pricing, and automation considerations for using this feature, providing a comprehensive guide for securing ASP.NET Core applications with Azure Key Vault and Sentry.

Sentry's primary job is to ingest user errors, but it requires two competing requirements: the event ingestion system must be responsive and fast under all types of load, and error data must be accessible in near real-time. To address this, Sentry uses an asynchronous processing system that includes saving events on ClickHouse and performing post-process tasks. However, this creates a problem where it's unclear whether the event has been persisted before trying to read it. To mitigate this, Sentry built a system called Synchronized Consumer that allows a Kafka consumer to pause itself and wait for another consumer to commit an offset before consuming the same message. This ensures that events are processed only when they have been stored in ClickHouse. Additionally, Sentry uses ClickHouse's stronger consistency guarantees, such as using the in_order load balancing schema, which drives the load balancer to pick healthy replicas in a defined order, ensuring reads and writes happen on the same replica.

Sentry's event ingestion system needs to be responsive, fast, and scalable under all types of load while also providing near real-time access to error data. To achieve this, Sentry uses an asynchronous processing pipeline that involves inserting events into a Kafka topic, where multiple consumers read from the topic and write to ClickHouse in batches. However, this approach raises concerns about event persistence and consistency. To mitigate these issues, Sentry developed a system called Synchronized Consumer, which allows a Kafka consumer to pause itself and wait for another consumer to commit an offset before consuming that same message. This ensures that events are processed only when they have been stored in ClickHouse. Additionally, ClickHouse's distributed database with multi-master, eventually-consistent asynchronous replication is used to ensure that reads come from up-to-date replicas by using the in_order load balancing schema and inserting data synchronously. This approach provides a consistency model that resembles sequential consistency while sacrificing some availability, but it has been deemed sufficient for Sentry's needs.

Sentry welcomed Todd Bazakas as its new CFO one year ago today, bringing experience from previous roles including Head of Finance at Atlassian and Business Manager at Wizards of the Coast. As a rollerblader, skier, beach-goer, basketball fan, stock market enthusiast, and father watching his son play football, Todd seems to enjoy an active lifestyle with diverse interests outside of finance.

Sentry welcomes Todd Bazakas as their new CFO, bringing over a decade of finance experience from roles at Atlassian and Wizards of the Coast. In his free time, Todd enjoys rollerblading, skiing, and watching basketball, among other activities. As Sentry's new leader in finance, he will oversee the company's financial operations and contribute to its overall growth and success.

Sentry will be attending PagerDuty Summit from September 23rd to 25th, where they'll explore the power of error monitoring and provide tips on optimizing error monitoring with alerts, context, and cross-project visibility. Sentry's Head of Product, Dave Hayes, will also be speaking about a new integration that allows developers to get to an error's root-cause faster. Sentry will have a booth at the summit where attendees can learn more about how Sentry can help build better software, faster, and receive a fun bath bomb as a gift.

Sentry will be attending PagerDuty Summit from September 23rd to 25th, where they'll explore the power of error monitoring and showcase their capabilities in an interactive setting. Sentry's team members, including Neil Manvar and Dave Hayes, will be speaking at the event, sharing insights on optimizing error monitoring with alerts, context, and cross-project visibility. The company will also have a booth where attendees can learn more about Sentry's features and benefits, as well as meet the team in person.

Sentry has integrated its data team's experience with Apache Beam into its SDKs, making it easier and faster to debug issues in the framework. By injecting Sentry code into the ParDo class, errors can be directed and reported to Sentry without having to search through noisy log lines. The integration allows developers to capture exceptions and tags for context, providing a more actionable interface for searching and debugging issues. Additionally, the integration enables Java developers to use Sentry with Beam by specifying the Sentry DSN as an option when running the pipeline.

Sentry is being used to make debugging Apache Beam easier and faster by integrating it into the Beam framework, allowing developers to capture and report errors in a more structured way. This integration provides a better user experience for data engineers, enabling them to quickly identify and resolve issues without having to dig through noisy log lines. The integration includes support for both Python and Java versions of Beam, making it accessible to a wider range of users. By using Sentry with Beam, developers can deploy their data pipelines with confidence, knowing that errors are being captured and reported in a reliable and efficient manner.