March 2021 Summaries

Sentry's mobile error monitoring solution has improved its support for Flutter platform developers, allowing them to monitor Dart/Flutter and Native SDKs. The solution also provides features such as offline caching, attachment support, performance monitoring, release health tracking, and analysis tools to help developers solve errors faster and improve their applications. Sentry's latest updates aim to provide a better user experience by connecting error reports with user engagement data and enabling teams to track the adoption of new releases and identify areas for improvement. The solution is now available for multiple platforms including iOS, Android, Java, JavaScript, Native, Xamarin, and .NET.

Sentry Performance` helped identify performance issues with their `Flagr` feature flag system by using its auto-instrumentation and manual instrumentation capabilities to pinpoint slow code paths, specifically the deserialization of large JSON responses, which was taking a significant amount of time. By identifying this issue, Sentry was able to optimize their implementation, reducing the time it took to check all 50 feature flags from 900ms to 10ms. The use of `Feature Flags` is a great tool for controlling system behavior without destabilizing the codebase, but having the right tools and insights, such as those provided by `Sentry Performance`, is crucial to using them effectively.

Sentry is extending its Performance monitoring feature to Android applications, providing developers with full visibility into how their customers experience Android's myriad applications. This includes collecting context such as hardware model, software version, screen orientation, and battery level, as well as performance data like disk writes, media fetches, and object loads. To use Sentry on Android, developers need to install the Android SDK, add it to their build.gradle file, and configure the SDK with a DSN value. The current version of the Android SDK supports auto instrumentation activity rendering and will soon offer automatic span creation for active transactions and breadcrumb recording for outgoing HTTP requests. Sentry is also offering a referral program for new users, providing three free months on its Team plan.

During a Hack Week at Sentry, the team embarked on the challenge of implementing dark mode, which quickly evolved from a minor project into a significant overhaul of their design system. The initiative required a meticulous cleanup of color variables and the creation of a consistent color system, which involved refactoring numerous components and resolving inconsistencies across their codebase. By organizing colors into a structured palette and creating aliases for easier toggling between light and dark modes, the team not only enhanced the visual consistency of their interface but also improved maintainability and accessibility. This process entailed extensive collaboration, debate over naming conventions, and careful consideration of component relationships, ultimately leading to a more robust and coherent design system that mitigates the risks of "radioactive" code, which previously plagued their front-end development.

The Sentry Performance monitoring tool is now available on React Native, allowing developers to monitor and optimize the performance of their mobile applications. With its integration with Sentry's SDK, developers can easily instrument their code to track transactions, spans, and other performance metrics, enabling them to identify slow operations and improve overall app performance. The Sentry team has provided examples and recipes for using Performance on React Native, including how to set up basic monitoring, instrument Promises, create a transaction hub, and monitor real-time data flows. By leveraging these tools and techniques, developers can gain valuable insights into their app's performance and make data-driven decisions to improve user experience.

The issue details page at Sentry's website was experiencing response times of over a second due to a delay in loading the latest event component after the summary statistics had finished rendering. To solve this problem, Sentry used Performance tooling to gain visibility into the requests and identify that the two components were not being parallelized. By starting to load data from both endpoints higher up in the component tree, Sentry was able to parallelize the requests, reducing the response time of the issue page by about 1 second. This fix allowed Sentry's customers to see a faster page and improved overall performance.

This month, updates have been made to several mobile SDKs including Flutter. The new Flutter SDK by Sentry allows developers to fix issues once and apply the solution across all platforms. It provides device and OS details, native crash reports, session data, and version adoption information. Developers can now easily segment issues and monitor Dart/Flutter and Native SDKs (Kotlin, Java for Android, Swift, Objective-C for iOS, and C/C++ for both platforms). Sentry also symbolizes Flutter apps, captures UI events and HTTP requests as breadcrumbs, and provides offline caching and fatal crash support. The event query tool Discover helps developers understand how an issue impacts users across various segments. With real-time error notifications, developers can quickly solve issues with full context and learn from event data to improve user adoption and engagement.