January 2022 Summaries

The Sentry team has shared a retrospective of their 2021 accomplishments, highlighting various product launches, feature enhancements, and technical investments. They introduced new products such as Mobile Performance Monitoring, Review List, and Stack Trace Linking, which aim to help developers monitor app performance in real-time. The company also improved its existing features, including Discover & Dashboards, Automatic Ticket Creation, and Team Stats. Additionally, Sentry made significant technical investments, acquiring Specto, a mobile profiling tool, and converting 100% of their OSS front-end code to TypeScript. They also expanded their support for various platforms, such as Unity and Next.js, and introduced features like No Code AWS Lambda Monitoring and SCIM provisioning. Furthermore, the team gave $155,000 directly to open source maintainers and implemented several user-facing improvements, including Full Semantic versioning support and Change and Crash Rate Alerts.

In 2021, Sentry focused on enhancing its product offerings to help developers monitor application performance, solve issues quickly, and learn continuously about their applications. Key updates included the launch of Mobile Performance Monitoring, Review List, Stack Trace Linking, Trace Views, and the Sentry Sandbox. Additionally, Sentry introduced full Semantic versioning (SemVer) support, change and crash rate alerts, Unity SDK, Next.js SDK, Java and .NET SDKs improvements, and AWS Lambda monitoring. Furthermore, they made significant technical investments such as acquiring Specto, supporting open source maintainers, converting OSS front-end code to TypeScript, and launching globally distributed Points-of-Presence (PoPs) for event ingestion.

Sentry is deprecating its U2F API for registration and authentication, replacing it with WebAuthn due to Google Chrome's decision to stop supporting U2F API after February 2022. The migration process involves two main parts: authenticating existing devices using WebAuthn and registering new devices. To migrate, developers must replace deprecated APIs with their WebAuthn counterparts and update their authentication flow to use the new specification. WebAuthn is an API that allows web services to seamlessly integrate strong authentication into applications, providing users with a choice of authenticators such as security keys or built-in platform authenticators.

The U2F API is being deprecated and will no longer be supported by Google Chrome after February 2022, forcing developers to migrate their applications to WebAuthn for strong authentication. The migration involves two main parts: authenticating existing U2F devices with WebAuthn and registering new devices with WebAuthn. For authentication, the process involves generating a challenge and state, creating PublicKeyCredential data, verifying the device, and sending the result back to the server where it is used to authenticate users. For registration, the process involves generating a PublicKeyCredentialRpEntity and state, creating PublicKeyCredential data, registering the device, and extracting some data from the response to save the registered device data. The migration requires replacing U2F API calls with their WebAuthn equivalents in both the frontend and backend codebases.