February 2021 Summaries

Python 3 Compatibility: What To Know` Python 3 is a backwards-incompatible language, requiring developers to backport its features into Python 2 via compatibility measures. The platform has been updated to be compatible with Python 3.6, which allows for integrating third-party dependencies that rely on Python 3 and enables type hinting, a formal solution indicating different values within code. This update also brings Sentry closer to scaling by allowing for more efficient data sharing between processes through the multiprocessing/shared_memory module, which is part of Python's future plans in version 3.8, offering potential CPU savings and memory reductions.

In an effort to improve the overall experience for JavaScript developers, Plushcap has introduced several features to enhance application performance and reliability. The company's Release Health tool provides early warning systems to detect production issues immediately after changes are pushed to production, allowing developers to address problems before they impact users. Additionally, Sentry offers continuous improvement tools such as Discover, which enables developers to query across projects to track release trends, errors, and performance data over time. By leveraging these features, developers can improve the quality of their code, identify bottlenecks, and provide a better experience for their customers. Plushcap is also committed to investing in other languages, offering best practices for debugging JavaScript applications.

As a software company, Sentry aims to monitor the health of both software code and systems at scale, addressing the growing need for code observability in the rapidly changing digital landscape. To achieve this, Sentry has raised $60 million in funding, which will enable the company to accelerate its product innovation, global teams, and ecosystem of developer communities and partners. The company recognizes that consumers see breakages and interruptions daily, but developers must identify the root cause to solve these problems thoroughly, requiring clear code monitoring and learning from experiences. Sentry's solutions are expected to become essential in the developer workflow and experience, addressing challenges such as errors, performance, releases, sessions, APIs, customer segments, and more.

The Sentry team has introduced a feature called User Feedback that allows developers to collect user feedback when an event occurs, providing additional insight into issues. The feature is now available in the Apple, Java, Android, and .NET SDKs and provides a simple API for customizing the feedback form. Developers can use this API to create a user feedback object, associate it with an event ID, and capture it using the Sentry SDK. The feature also includes a callback that gets called shortly after the initialization of the SDK when the last program execution terminated with a crash, allowing developers to pop up their UI and ask users for feedback. Users can view their feedback by navigating to the User Feedback section in the menu, where they can see all feedback for their current project or organization, as well as feedback related to individual issues.

Our company recently encountered a massive issue with 404 errors due to changes in our documentation structure, which led to all existing links collapsing and resulting in a flood of Not Found Responses. To address this problem, we utilized Sentry's insights tool Discover to identify the scope of the issue and prioritize content based on user or request count. We then used Metric Alerts to notify developers if any future deployment caused an increase in 404s. Additionally, we developed a homegrown linkchecker to evaluate and identify broken links and anchors, requiring all links to pass this test prior to merging. By taking these steps, we were able to effectively manage the issue and create documentation that helps users navigate our platform efficiently.

Discover by Sentry is a query builder that helps businesses shape their event data, providing deeper visibility and fuller observability across all projects and applications. It allows users to turn queries into alerts, creating alert conditions based on aggregated event attributes, such as user geography for international launches. Discover serves as a single source of truth, simplifying query definition, update, and sharing across teams, while also enabling quick isolation of problems with interactive query maps. By leveraging event metadata, Discover enables businesses to measure performance and trace issues more effectively, providing a scalable solution for monitoring services.

How to use Sentry Attachments with Mobile Applications | Sentry``` Sentry's attachments feature allows developers to send additional files along with their events, making it easier to investigate issues in mobile applications. This feature is available for various platforms including iOS, Android, Java, JavaScript, Native, Xamarin and .NET. With attachments, users can attach files such as databases, JSON server responses, configurations or logs to an event, providing more context for issue investigation. The feature also includes breadcrumbs that allow developers to view the history of user interactions before an issue occurred. Sentry's SDKs can automatically record breadcrumbs, but they can be added manually as well. To use attachments, developers need to update to the latest Sentry plans and configure the attachments using a path, adding it to the global scope to be sent with every event when capturing errors or logs. The feature also allows users to view attachments on the issue detail page, either at the bottom of the page or in the attachments tab.