Key Terms & Features

Some of the below terms have corresponding features with the same name (in upper case) in the Key Features section.

Key Terms

• alerts - Alerts let you know about problems with your code in real-time by sending you notifications when certain alert rule conditions are met. There are several types of alerts available with customizable thresholds and integrations.

• attachments - Stored additional files, such as config or log files that are related to an error event.

• data - Anything you send to Sentry. This includes, events (errors or transactions), attachments, and event metadata.

• distributed trace - When a trace includes work in multiple services, it's called a distributed trace, because the trace is distributed across those services.

• DSN - Data Source Name. A DSN tells the Sentry SDK where to send events so the events are associated with the correct project. Sentry automatically assigns you a DSN when you create a project. Learn more in our full DSN documentation.

• environment - environment is a Sentry-supported tag that you can add to your SDK that's intended to refer to your code deployments' naming convention, such as development, testing, staging, or production. Environments help you better filter issues and transactions among other uses. Learn more in our full Environments documentation.

• error - What counts as an error varies by platform, but in general, if there's something that looks like an exception, it can be captured as an error in Sentry. Sentry automatically captures errors, uncaught exceptions, and unhandled rejections, as well as other types of errors, depending on platform.

• event - An error or a transaction.

• issues - An issue is a grouping of similar errors or performance problems. Every event has a set of characteristics called its fingerprint, which is what Sentry uses to group them. For example, Sentry groups error events together when they are triggered by the same part of your code. This grouping of events into issues allows you to see how frequently a problem is happening and how many users it's affecting.

• performance monitoring - Performance monitoring is the act of tracking application performance and measuring metrics such as how many transactions are being sent and the average response time for all occurrences of a given transaction. To do this, Sentry captures distributed traces consisting of transactions and spans to measure individual services, as well as operations within those services.

• project - A project represents your service or application in Sentry. You can create a project for a particular language or framework used in your application. For example, you might have separate projects for your API server and frontend client. For more information, check out our best practices for creating projects. Projects allow you to associate events with a distinct application in your organization and assign responsibility and ownership to specific users and teams within your organization.

• release - A release is a version of your code deployed to an environment. When you notify Sentry about a release, you can identify new issues and regressions associated with it, confirm whether an issue is resolved in the next release, and apply source maps. Learn more in the full Releases documentation.

• release health - Release health data provides insight into the impact of crashes and bugs as it relates to your user's experience and reveals trends with each new issue. Learn more in the full release health documentation.

• sentry.io - Sentry's user interface for SaaS customers, where event data captured by our SDK is visualized. (For self-hosted users, the user interface is on an internal domain for your company.)

• Sentry SDKs - Sentry's programming language/framework-specific libraries for application monitoring. When you add one of our SDKs to your application, event data from your application is captured and sent to Sentry, so we can provide you with error and performance reports.

• span - A span is the basic unit that traces are composed of. Multiple groups of parent-child spans make up a trace in Sentry and share a trace_id, which can help you get to the root cause of a problem faster.

• team - Teams are associated with your Sentry projects, and their members receive issue notifications as a group. Learn more about setting up teams.

• trace - A trace is the record of the entire operation you want to measure or track - like page load, an instance of a user completing some action in your application, or a cron job in your backend.

• transaction - A transaction represents a single instance of a service being called to support an operation you want to measure or track, like a page load, page navigation, or asynchronous task. Transaction events are grouped by the transaction name.

Key Features

Each of these key features have their own page (or set of pages) in the sentry.io application.

• Issues - Displays information about grouped problems in your application. From here, you can go to the Issue Details page for a more granular view of any issue. Learn more in the full Issues documentation.

• Projects - Lists the projects of which you're a member, by team, and provides you with a high-level overview of your projects. From here, you can go to the Project Details page of each project for a more granular view. Learn more in the full Projects documentation.

• Explore - Sentry offers multiple ways to search and investigate your application's data — including your app's traces, metrics, profiles, replays, and events — to get the information you need to debug issues more quickly and easily. Use the Discover page to query events across environments, visualize the results, and unlock insights into the health of your entire system. Learn more in the full Explore documentation.

• Insights - Sentry surfaces insights that can help you identify opportunities at the service-level to improve various parts of your app's performance, including requests, assets, caches, queues, and more. Modules living under the Insights heading provide an overview of how your project is performing in that category, as well as the ability to review sample events and their traces to help you diagnose potential problems.

• Performance - The main view in sentry.io where you can search or browse for transaction data. The page displays graphs that visualize transactions or trends, as well as a table where you can view relevant transactions and drill down to more information about them. Learn more in the full performance monitoring documentation.

• Alerts - Where you can create new alert rules and manage existing ones. Learn more in the full Alerts documentation.

• Dashboards - Provide you with a broad overview of your application’s health by allowing you to navigate through error and performance data across multiple projects. Dashboards are made up of one or more widgets, and each widget visualizes one or more Discover or Issues queries. Learn more in the full Dashboards documentation.

• Releases - Provides a high-level view of each release version, the associated project, the adoption stage of each release, the authors of each commit, as well as release health data including the percentage of crash-free users, and the percentage of crash-free sessions. You can navigate directly to the Releases page or from the Issue Details page, by selecting release ID listed under "Last Seen". Learn more in the full Releases documentation.