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May I suggest adding some additional context to the home page? While I heard about Sentry I find difficult to understand what Spotlight does. I might not be the

by pb060 3y ago

May I suggest adding some additional context to the home page? While I heard about Sentry I find difficult to understand what Spotlight does. I might not be the intended target audience though.

zeeg 3y ago
This seems to be a super shared point of view. I’ll admit we were a bit fire-and-forget on the homepage and definitely agree with all the feedback that we need to explain what it is better.
- conor- 3y ago
  Is this supposed to be intended for people who are already all-in with Sentry? Or can you possibly share some insight as to where this makes sense to use vs instrumenting with an OTEL SDK?
  - zeeg 3y ago
    Both. Fwiw lots of folks have yet to invest in OTel so the market is super open. We’re also trying to adjust our approach to leverage OTels community instrumentation when it makes sense. That means that ideally you’ll be able to invest in OTel if you want and we’ll just consume those spans. The other thing to note: OTel doesn’t do everything and Sentrys error context is a big part of the value prop.
    - conor- 3y ago
      Thanks for the reply. Would the Spotlight sidecar possibly be able to run independently and consume spans emitted by the Sentry exporter[0] or some other similar flow beyond strictly exporting directly from the Sentry SDK provided by Spotlight? This tooling looks really cool and I'd love to play around with it, but am already pretty entrenched into OTel and funneling data through the collector and don't want to introduce too much additional overhead for devs. [0] https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/tree/main/exporter/sentryexporter https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-co...
      - zeeg 3y ago
        Yeah it absolutely could. Our docs aren’t great here and we may need to improve the APIs but it was important for us to not couple this to Sentry. The idea is that any data source could stream to the sidecar and at the same time consume from it with a curated panel in the UI. If you’re interested in poking around def hop in our Discord (https://discord.gg/sentry https://discord.gg/sentry #spotlight) and let us know your thoughts.
qxxx 3y ago
I also have no idea what it does. "Sentry for development", so it works like sentry but the errors are streamed to localhost??
- zeeg 3y ago
  That’s a good way to think about it yeah. It’s not 1:1, and also can be extended beyond Sentry, but that was our MVP.
  - boxed 3y ago
    I don't understand the use case. If it's local, I'll just get a nice traceback and I can use the normal debugger. So what's the point of this?
    - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
      Not in all cases do you get a traceback into the UI. In some cases you have to look at your terminal or console. In this case it goes straight into your browser window. But additionally it also shows you a bunch of traces going on for instrumented calls.
Nthringas 3y ago
it looks to me like it covers the same funcionality as browser developer tools but I am also pretty sure those are going away soon, which will mean the only way to inspect websites will be using tools like this (+ WASM binary formats + google controlled web-runtime[0] means the open web is not open anymore) [0] https://thewebshowcase.withgoogle.com/bring-code-from-platforms-into-the-browser https://thewebshowcase.withgoogle.com/bring-code-from-platfo...
- sharlos201068 3y ago
  Why do you think they'd go away? As far as I'm aware all major browsers continue to add new functionality to their dev tools.
- bentlegen 3y ago
  Your browser's dev tools don't show you what's happening inside your server (and any downstream services) when responding to the browser's HTTP requests. Spotlight does. That's what's special about it.
- KTibow 3y ago
  What? JS isn't getting replaced by WASM. Also some quick Googling says WASM is a joint project by the W3C and multiple browser owners, and debug tools exist for it in Chrome and Firefox already
simonbarker87 3y ago
I agree and find this is the case for many projects like this. I read the homepage and have no idea what the tool does and why I might find it helpful, it wasn’t until I read the inset block on the “Getting Started” page for this one that I had even an inkling what it did. Most of these types of home page seem to be written assuming I already know what their tool does.

by pb060 3y ago

May I suggest adding some additional context to the home page? While I heard about Sentry I find difficult to understand what Spotlight does. I might not be the intended target audience though.

zeeg 3y ago

This seems to be a super shared point of view. I’ll admit we were a bit fire-and-forget on the homepage and definitely agree with all the feedback that we need to explain what it is better.

conor- 3y ago
Is this supposed to be intended for people who are already all-in with Sentry? Or can you possibly share some insight as to where this makes sense to use vs instrumenting with an OTEL SDK?
- zeeg 3y ago
  Both. Fwiw lots of folks have yet to invest in OTel so the market is super open. We’re also trying to adjust our approach to leverage OTels community instrumentation when it makes sense. That means that ideally you’ll be able to invest in OTel if you want and we’ll just consume those spans. The other thing to note: OTel doesn’t do everything and Sentrys error context is a big part of the value prop.
  - conor- 3y ago
    Thanks for the reply. Would the Spotlight sidecar possibly be able to run independently and consume spans emitted by the Sentry exporter[0] or some other similar flow beyond strictly exporting directly from the Sentry SDK provided by Spotlight? This tooling looks really cool and I'd love to play around with it, but am already pretty entrenched into OTel and funneling data through the collector and don't want to introduce too much additional overhead for devs. [0] https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/tree/main/exporter/sentryexporter https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-co...
    - zeeg 3y ago
      Yeah it absolutely could. Our docs aren’t great here and we may need to improve the APIs but it was important for us to not couple this to Sentry. The idea is that any data source could stream to the sidecar and at the same time consume from it with a curated panel in the UI. If you’re interested in poking around def hop in our Discord (https://discord.gg/sentry https://discord.gg/sentry #spotlight) and let us know your thoughts.

qxxx 3y ago

I also have no idea what it does. "Sentry for development", so it works like sentry but the errors are streamed to localhost??

zeeg 3y ago
That’s a good way to think about it yeah. It’s not 1:1, and also can be extended beyond Sentry, but that was our MVP.
- boxed 3y ago
  I don't understand the use case. If it's local, I'll just get a nice traceback and I can use the normal debugger. So what's the point of this?
  - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
    Not in all cases do you get a traceback into the UI. In some cases you have to look at your terminal or console. In this case it goes straight into your browser window. But additionally it also shows you a bunch of traces going on for instrumented calls.

Nthringas 3y ago

it looks to me like it covers the same funcionality as browser developer tools but I am also pretty sure those are going away soon, which will mean the only way to inspect websites will be using tools like this (+ WASM binary formats + google controlled web-runtime[0] means the open web is not open anymore) [0] https://thewebshowcase.withgoogle.com/bring-code-from-platforms-into-the-browser https://thewebshowcase.withgoogle.com/bring-code-from-platfo...

sharlos201068 3y ago
Why do you think they'd go away? As far as I'm aware all major browsers continue to add new functionality to their dev tools.
bentlegen 3y ago
Your browser's dev tools don't show you what's happening inside your server (and any downstream services) when responding to the browser's HTTP requests. Spotlight does. That's what's special about it.
KTibow 3y ago
What? JS isn't getting replaced by WASM. Also some quick Googling says WASM is a joint project by the W3C and multiple browser owners, and debug tools exist for it in Chrome and Firefox already

simonbarker87 3y ago

I agree and find this is the case for many projects like this. I read the homepage and have no idea what the tool does and why I might find it helpful, it wasn’t until I read the inset block on the “Getting Started” page for this one that I had even an inkling what it did. Most of these types of home page seem to be written assuming I already know what their tool does.