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Sentry looks cool. I have previously tested Rollbar and Airbrake, but was deeply unsatisfied with both. The big problem I have with all these services is that

Sentry looks cool. I have previously tested Rollbar and Airbrake, but was deeply unsatisfied with both. The big problem I have with all these services is that you need set up each application individually: Each one is a silo, with its own notification settings, API key, and so on. We have dozens of apps (several products + lots of microservices), so this is just unacceptable. I looked into whether I could use a single API key with Rollbar or Airbrake, and simply tag each event with the name of the sender, but it turns out this is not feasible. They don't even have APIs that let you programmatically configure apps remotely. How does Sentry compare? (Many other SaaS services suffer from the same issue; for example, Semaphore, which we use for CI, requires a build script for each project. We worked around this by letting the build script be a single curl command that pipes a remote script to bash, shared across all projects. But hardly ideal.)

zeeg 11y ago
We're pretty similar in a lot of ways. It's definitely a pain point, but from a UX perspective its tough to solve. In theory you could manage a lot of things with the API (most of our UI runs off the API these days). Even with the limitations, we have many people with hundreds of projects, and the general problems we see are more around notification settings than anything else. The usual suspect is that people are getting too many emails when they either want none, or they want digests. We are giving this a lot of thought as part of our upcoming infrastructure pass. From my point of view it'd make a lot of sense if you could just have a massive stream of events and sort through them however you want. That causes a lot of challenges so it may not be feasible. Either way its a problem we're aware of and looking to address. The simplest solution from our point of view is to allow you to configure some kind of organization-wide defaults. That won't resolve the API key constraints, but we don't feel that specifically is a pain point.
- atombender 11y ago
  I see. What I don't understand is why settings need to be so granular. For example, our company uses Slack. All notifications go to Slack. There's no need for per-project settings because it's all just one room. At some point we will probably want some projects to go to other rooms, but that's a coarse-grained exception, not something that warrants a per-project setting. Also, if you need per-person notification settings, then surely that's part of the user's account/profile, not the project. That would be just a single dashboard page with (say) on/off sliders for each project. In my mind, the data model used by exception trackers (including, it seems, Sentry) is wrong. There needs to be just one stream of events, tagged by things like application name that you can filter on. How those events map to things like notifications and aggregations and rules and source files and teams and so on is completely orthogonal to the stream. Those things then apply to a subset that you can modify dynamically without having to reconfigure the sender.
  - duggan 11y ago
    This is basically how Datadog works. Unfortunately they do service monitoring rather than exception tracking, but certainly lessons can be learned from them. Hands down the best designed operations product I've used.
spo81rty 11y ago
Stackify works with a single API key for all apps and I think we do a good job with notification settings. Love to see what you think. Thanks Matt with Stackify.
- lobster_johnson 11y ago
  Looks decent. Slack integration? Does it intelligently group messages with similar messages together? Is there a sandbox account I can look at without having to sign up and log test events? Your logging service seems overpriced, by the way. I'd love to have a central, cloud-based log viewer, but our system is producing many, many gigs worth per day. At the moment our expenditures are about $80/mo for a small rsyslog box, but with your system we'd be paying thousands. For that price I can whip up a bunch of Graylog boxes and get approximately what you're offering, at the expense of having to admin ElasticSearch myself, which we're already doing anyway.
  - spo81rty 11y ago
    We integrate with Slack, TFS and JIRA. Yes we intelligent group things. From our home page you can click sandbox on the top menu and play around with most things. We do some unique things like when looking at error show you all the log statements related to the same transaction. Our pricing is similar to our competitors. But there are self hosted open source options as well, like you mentioned. A lot of our customers like our product because we combine monitoring, errors, logs, metrics and even apm on one easy to use platform. It's very unique.
brianr 11y ago
Brian from Rollbar here. You actually can do what you describe in Rollbar: set the name of the app as the 'environment' (configured via application code), and then you can just use a single API key. That's not really what it's designed for, but I think it would work rather well. I'm not sure when you last looked at our APIs, but we do now have methods for creating and managing projects (though not yet notification settings): https://rollbar.com/docs/api/provisioning/ https://rollbar.com/docs/api/provisioning/
ergo14 11y ago
You could set something like this with App Enlight as everything you can interact with via API calls.

zeeg 11y ago

We're pretty similar in a lot of ways. It's definitely a pain point, but from a UX perspective its tough to solve. In theory you could manage a lot of things with the API (most of our UI runs off the API these days). Even with the limitations, we have many people with hundreds of projects, and the general problems we see are more around notification settings than anything else. The usual suspect is that people are getting too many emails when they either want none, or they want digests. We are giving this a lot of thought as part of our upcoming infrastructure pass. From my point of view it'd make a lot of sense if you could just have a massive stream of events and sort through them however you want. That causes a lot of challenges so it may not be feasible. Either way its a problem we're aware of and looking to address. The simplest solution from our point of view is to allow you to configure some kind of organization-wide defaults. That won't resolve the API key constraints, but we don't feel that specifically is a pain point.

atombender 11y ago
I see. What I don't understand is why settings need to be so granular. For example, our company uses Slack. All notifications go to Slack. There's no need for per-project settings because it's all just one room. At some point we will probably want some projects to go to other rooms, but that's a coarse-grained exception, not something that warrants a per-project setting. Also, if you need per-person notification settings, then surely that's part of the user's account/profile, not the project. That would be just a single dashboard page with (say) on/off sliders for each project. In my mind, the data model used by exception trackers (including, it seems, Sentry) is wrong. There needs to be just one stream of events, tagged by things like application name that you can filter on. How those events map to things like notifications and aggregations and rules and source files and teams and so on is completely orthogonal to the stream. Those things then apply to a subset that you can modify dynamically without having to reconfigure the sender.
- duggan 11y ago
  This is basically how Datadog works. Unfortunately they do service monitoring rather than exception tracking, but certainly lessons can be learned from them. Hands down the best designed operations product I've used.

spo81rty 11y ago

Stackify works with a single API key for all apps and I think we do a good job with notification settings. Love to see what you think. Thanks Matt with Stackify.

lobster_johnson 11y ago
Looks decent. Slack integration? Does it intelligently group messages with similar messages together? Is there a sandbox account I can look at without having to sign up and log test events? Your logging service seems overpriced, by the way. I'd love to have a central, cloud-based log viewer, but our system is producing many, many gigs worth per day. At the moment our expenditures are about $80/mo for a small rsyslog box, but with your system we'd be paying thousands. For that price I can whip up a bunch of Graylog boxes and get approximately what you're offering, at the expense of having to admin ElasticSearch myself, which we're already doing anyway.
- spo81rty 11y ago
  We integrate with Slack, TFS and JIRA. Yes we intelligent group things. From our home page you can click sandbox on the top menu and play around with most things. We do some unique things like when looking at error show you all the log statements related to the same transaction. Our pricing is similar to our competitors. But there are self hosted open source options as well, like you mentioned. A lot of our customers like our product because we combine monitoring, errors, logs, metrics and even apm on one easy to use platform. It's very unique.

brianr 11y ago

Brian from Rollbar here. You actually can do what you describe in Rollbar: set the name of the app as the 'environment' (configured via application code), and then you can just use a single API key. That's not really what it's designed for, but I think it would work rather well. I'm not sure when you last looked at our APIs, but we do now have methods for creating and managing projects (though not yet notification settings): https://rollbar.com/docs/api/provisioning/ https://rollbar.com/docs/api/provisioning/

ergo14 11y ago

You could set something like this with App Enlight as everything you can interact with via API calls.