Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

February 2022

Distributed Tracing and Suspect Spans

At the root of every performance issue is, there is most often a single event that creates a domino effect of excruciatingly slow load times. With distributed tracing, we give you all the context to see what actually matters and help you solve what’s urgent faster. However in some cases, you might want or like really need a short cut. And this is where Suspect Spans come into play.

How we optimized Python API server code 100x

Python code optimization may seem easy or hard depending on the performance target. If the target is “best effort”, carefully choosing the algorithm and applying well-known common practices is usually enough. If the target is dictated by the UX, you have to go down a few abstraction layers and hack the system sometimes. Or rewrite the underlying libraries. Or change the language, really. This post is about our experience in Python code optimizations when whatever you do is not fast enough.

Tracking Stability in a Bluetooth Low Energy-Based React-Native App

For most of my career I’ve worked with health and wellness startups. Most of these companies have a wearable that tracks movement, heart rate, body weight or stimulates a body part. The common denominator between these apps is their use of sensor data to determine physiological progress an athlete is making. Problem is, your Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) device does not have an internet connection and cannot send diagnostics anywhere if there are errors.

Node Congress Lightning Talk: Monitoring errors and slowdowns with a JS frontend and Node backend

We've got a JavaScript frontend hitting a Node (Express.js) backend. Join Chris Stavitsky in this quick 7-min demo as he goes through how to know which party is responsible for which error, what the impact is, and all the context needed to solve it. This lightning talk took place at Node Congress on Feb. 17, 2022.

Node Congress Workshop: Tracking errors and slowdowns in Node + JavaScript using Sentry

Join Neil Manvar, Sales Engineer Manager, as he sets up Sentry step-by-step to get visibility into our frontend and backend. Once integrated, he will show you how to track and triage errors + transactions surfaced by Sentry from our services to understand why/where/how errors and slowdowns occurred within the application code. This workshop took place live at Node Congress on February 15, 2022.

Cut Out the Noise: Issue Grouping and Alerting Best Practices

We’re drowning in emails and Slack notifications. As our eyes glaze over, we start bulk-archiving everything into folders we most likely never go into again - missing critical bugs, crashes, or slowdowns sometimes weeks too late. Learn from Dustin Bailey, Solutions Engineer at Sentry, and Phillip Jones, Ecosystem Product Manager, as they share issue grouping and alerting best practices to help cut out the noise so you can start taking action on issues faster.

Updates to Dashboards and Stats

Between planning, triaging tickets, negotiating requirements with external stakeholders, and actually building software, it’s hard to take the time to make dashboards or even think about the most important metrics your team needs to track. To make it easier for you to get insights into your team effectiveness and project health, we made a few updates to Dashboards and Stats that you just might like.

Why is Python so Popular?

Despite several widely acknowledged flaws, Python remains one of the most popular development languages worldwide. The sole fact that for years Python had two different and incompatible versions existing in parallel should have spelled the end for Python given the numerous alternatives available in the market. But Python overcame this conflict. Developers also criticized Python’s design and functionalities. Python is known to be slow and inadequate at dealing with memory-intensive operations.

Usual Performance Suspects: Introducing Suspect Spans

A trace is the end-to-end journey of one or more connected spans and a span is an operation or “work” taking place on a service. So when it comes to debugging a performance issue, being able to pick out slow spans out of a line up is the fastest way to seeing the root cause and knowing how to solve it. Suspect Spans surfaces a list of spans that correspond to where the most time in a transaction is spent.

DeveloperWeek 2022: Front-end Code Observability: Errors, Performance, Web Vitals

Good user experience requires a well performing frontend application. Code observability on a frontend application—to understand errors and their relevancy, performance of transactions, and Web Vitals to quantify website quality—is complex. By watching this video on-demand, you'll learn more about the tools that are available to aggregate and organize relevant frontend data to provide necessary visibility on errors and performance to keep users engaged.

UI Breadcrumbs for Android Error Events

In cases, when a crash happens in your Android application, you want more context on what occured before the issue — kind of like following breadcrumbs to the exception. Our SDKs automatically report breadcrumbs for activity lifecycle events, system events, HTTP requests, and many more. Now, Android developers will also see UI events listed as breadcrumbs and get the full picture of what happened without ever having to recreate the issue.