Dogfooding is the practice of sampling your own product before the public does. For dog food executives, chowing down on their own kibble is a literal gut-check. For Sentry, we’ve been using Performance in advance of its upcoming release as a way to think through our own issues, all so we can give you better visibility into yours. Context is critical for software teams. It bridges the gap between a problem to solve and the right person to solve it.

Week after week, developers work tirelessly to publish updates that improve the stability of their mobile applications, so people like me can rely on our phones for work, play, and even occasional childcare. So to all those on a bug fix rotation right now: thank you. Unfortunately, my appreciation isn’t actually a great indicator of a release’s success. Developers are looking to Sentry to provide insights like version adoption, crash-free sessions, crash-free users, etc.

As one of the leading grocery delivery services in India, Grofers needed to make massive fulfillment adjustments as demand rocketed due to an entire nation sheltering in place to help control the spread of infection during a global pandemic. For the Grofers team, providing much-needed grocery delivery service is as much of a technical challenge as a human resources one.

On the surface, food delivery service seems straightforward. However, creating a food delivery startup is more like building a transportation and logistics company than pizza delivery. Coordinating web and mobile applications for seamless ordering, tracking, and delivery, all within razor-thin service windows, takes an unprecedented level of complexity (when you get it right). And once you begin to scale service, the technical challenges become even greater.

At Sentry, we often get asked how error monitoring is different from APM or logging. To help answer this, I’ve broken down the different types of monitoring into four major categories.

With a service designed to help remote teams run more efficiently, Tability’s success relies on application reliability and deliverability to help its users keep complicated projects on schedule. This is why Tability has relied on Sentry error monitoring to identify issues in code and scale development work efficiently.

Different development teams exercise different production philosophies. These philosophies usually stem from greater company direction and culture but are guided by the experience of technical leadership. Aumni has built a unique technology solution to unlock data insights into investment auditing and due diligence for VCs. They need to remain nimble and develop great code (areas 1 and 2) but reduce the probability of user-facing errors and the time spent detecting and fixes new issues (area 3).

Big ideas need creative solutions. Creative solutions mean solving out of the box engineering problems. When you’re solving these new problems, strong error monitoring is imperative to the development cycle. You don’t want to spend all your time chasing down issues and struggling to track the source of errors.