Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Even at Sentry, we're not immune to downtime. In a moment of "oh-the-irony," we once took down our own application with a bad migration. We were adding a field to a critical database table, and the migration locked it completely. Since this table was essential to Sentry’s operation, the entire app went down. The website wouldn’t load, ingestion paused—everything ground to a halt.

This guide explains how errors work in PHP and how to debug them efficiently using logging functions and Sentry. The information in this guide is correct for PHP 8 and perhaps above, depending on how much future PHP versions change.

Sentry uses Issue Grouping to aggregate identical errors and prevent duplicate issues from being created, and duplicate alerts being sent. One of the chief complaints we’ve heard from our users is that in some cases the existing algorithm did not sufficiently group similar errors together, and Sentry would create separate issues and alerts, causing unnecessary disruption–or at least annoyance–to developers.

We’ve all worked on that app that hangs just a little too long in weird places, or had that query we could never get to perform just right. The network waterfall in Chrome DevTools can’t quite show us what’s going on behind the scenes, and tracing with OTel (and honestly, tracing in Sentry) was just… hard. Today that changes.