Issue Monitors and Alerts

Monitors and Alerts are used to customize issue detection and action. Monitors focus on when something becomes an issue; Alerts focus on what to do next (notify, ticket, webhook).

For the full product overview, see Monitors and Alerts.

How They Work Together

Monitors watch signals you care about on top of default error detection,like scheduled jobs, URLs, metric thresholds on spans, and custom application metrics and create issues when their conditions are met. Alerts run when issues match the triggers and filters you configure, and carry out actions such as Slack messages, email, or creating work items in an integrated tool.

flowchart LR
  subgraph detect["Monitors"]
    M[Detect problems]
  end
  subgraph issues["Issues"]
    I[Issues are created by Monitors]
  end
  subgraph respond["Alerts"]
    A[Take action on issue events]
  end
  M --> I
  I --> A

Typical flow:

1. A Monitor detects a problem → Sentry creates or updates an issue.
2. An Alert whose sources (Monitors) and filters (conditions) match that issue → runs actions (notifications, tickets, webhooks).

Alerts can be scoped to Projects or Monitors, so you can set one alert for multiple monitors or projects that your team owns. You can also multiple alerts for one monitor for uses like differing alerting needs for multiple teams or environments.

Monitors

Monitors define when errors, performance problems, or operational failures become issues you triage in Sentry. They include:

• Custom monitors for metrics, cron jobs, and uptime checks
• Default monitors coming from your SDK integration like issue grouping/fingerprint rules

Learn more about monitor types

Alerts

Alerts trigger when issue state or attributes match what you configure: for example, notify a Slack channel when a new issue appears, or open a Jira ticket when an issue is assigned and matches severity filters.

Learn how to create and manage alerts

Getting Started

1. Create or review Monitors for the signals you need (cron, uptime, metrics, defaults).
2. Create Alerts with the right sources, triggers, filters, and actions.
3. Add alerts to your team's workflow at the project or monitor level to be notified when issues match your filters.

Learn more about configuring Monitors and Alerts.