5 ms·

Isn’t Sentry just fancy logging at the end of the day?

• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• masklinn 5y ago
  AFAIK it's mostly intended as a way to generate tickets: hard errors go into sentry, and the logs can be used as breadcrumbs, but it's not intended to help you diagnose e.g. how and why a business process did something wrong (unless it ended up crashing I guess).
• nightpool 5y ago
  Yes, ultimately I think that's the stronger underlying argument that the author fails to make clearly—when you log something, it needs to be in a machine-readable format so that you can aggregate that data and gain value from it, and you need a system set up to deal with it on the other end. For example, on Heroku I have access to the wonderful Librato log connector, which makes metrics as easy as `stdout.write("my-metric-name=#{whatever}")`. I would also call that a form of "fancy logging"—now my logs are automatically connected to a graphing and alerting system, with a very long retention period. Sentry is the same way—instead of logging something into the aether, you have structured data (the error payload) that's connected to a system that can bug you about errors and help you aggregate the common sources of failure. Unstructured logging can occasionally be useful, but most of the time it's just not much more than noise.
• goodpoint 5y ago
  Worse: unreliable in case of network issues. When you might need your logs the most.