Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Finding performance wins in our own traces with a coding agent

For the last few weeks I’ve used a coding agent to find and fix backend performance issues in Sentry, starting from the traces Sentry sends to itself. Most of the fixes only changed a line or two. But together, they removed hundreds of millions of queries a week, and some expensive lookups became hundreds or thousands of times faster (more details on that below).

Search Sentry in Plain English

Did you know you can search your Sentry data the way you'd ask a teammate? In this video, I use plain English to query traces, metrics and logs in Sentry's Explore pages, and Sentry turns each question into a real query for me. Using my skateboard parts store as the example, I ask three questions: For each one, Sentry picks the filter, the visualization, the group-by and the sort order. I didn't need to know the span operation, the metric name or the exact log message. Once you have the result, you can add it to a dashboard or turn it into a monitor so you keep an eye on it.

Android profiling now uses Perfetto via ProfilingManager

Starting with Sentry Android SDK 8.51.0, profiling on Android 15+ devices is powered by Perfetto, through Android’s system ProfilingManager API. That means fewer legacy tracer crashes, lower CPU and memory overhead, and more representative profiles. You don’t need to change any configuration: if you already use continuous profiling, devices on Android 15 and newer pick up the new profiler as soon as you upgrade.

Measuring soft navigation web vitals

If we were to reduce web performance into a single term, it would be “web vitals”. Web vitals are a universal signal that every developer can measure, and more importantly, optimize for. They describe many facets of the user experience when it comes to performance, but they were limited to specific types of navigations. Capturing web vitals for your apps has been largely about users landing on your site from somewhere else. We measured that experience and you optimized for it.

Sentry under 8 mins

If you've never used Sentry, this is the short version. In under eight minutes, we walk through what it does, what it captures, and where to go next. Sentry is an application monitoring platform. It collects errors, logs, timings, and replays, and ties them together with tracing, so you can go from "something broke" to the line of code that broke it without opening six tabs. Here's what we cover: On data: out of the box, Sentry scrubs things like passwords, tokens, and credit card numbers. You decide what else gets collected, and you can choose US or EU storage.

Five things you can do with Sentry's Agent Tracing

AI-powered apps are hard to debug without observability. From one run to another, AI produces different results, goes down different paths, and you’re none the wiser as to why it’s happening. Agent Tracing bridges the gap between prompt, tool calls and final output, all within the context of your app. If things break (it always does at some point, we know from experience), you get everything in one complete trace.

Application Metric or Log? Which should you use?

Sentry offers both "Application Metrics" and "Logs", but both can seem pretty similar. Both logs and metrics are just a collection of attributes attached to a name in your code. Both can be counted, visualized, or alerted on. Both are not sampled by default. So how do you know which to choose? In this video, we'll briefly go over a few examples of when to use logs and when to use metrics. TLDR; Logs are designed for debugging and may be temporary or likely to change when problems arise. Metrics on the other hand are stable, purposely placed events used to track user behaviors.

How a beagle-shaped AI agent ships code to madewithvuejs.com

This is a guest post from Armin Ulrich, a fullstack developer, and founder of placid.app. He also created the MadeWith* network where he shares his projects and allows other developers to share theirs. Two people and one beagle run the project showcase madewithvuejs.com. The beagle is actually an AI agent that we have added to our workflows, but we’re very fond of her by now. Milly is part of the team, scouting for content, building features and sniffing for bugs.