🖥 Sentry Monitor

Big Idea

A job runs every five minutes that reviews all Sentry events in the last five minutes, and filters to those that meet some predetermined search criteria. The data is then summarized nicely and sent to New Relic and Anodot so that you can build dashboards and configure anomaly detection.

For more discussion of the how and why, see this blog post.

The Basic Mechanism

The main artifact of this repo is a web server with a single endpoint. A cron job should POST to this endpoint once every five minutes, triggering the job. The job will query Sentry, process the data, and report it to New Relic and Anodot. This (sometimes thought of as convoluted) architecture allows the service to be deployed on any number of servers with failover support and allows it to be safely restarted.

Some Vocabulary

Your Sentry account is called an organization (org). Within it, you have any number of projects, which hold untold numbers of events that are grouped into issues. You might have only one project if you have only one application, or you might have several if you work for a large company with lots of different product offerings. The issue grouping is based on Sentry's algorithm that attempts to group similar events so that you can get an idea of how common a bug is, etc.

Sentry Monitor is configured with a list of projects and their associated filters. Each filter contains an array of searchTerms. The projects are your Sentry projects, and the filters are ways to reduce the overload of events and group them into areas. For example, you might have a filter called ui that contains searchTerms: ['module_1', 'component_x'] because the UI developer(s) on your team are particularly interested in monitoring events that have module_1 or component_x in their text (because Sentry events contain the stack trace, this is an easy way to filter by location in the source). You might have another filter called infra and another filter all for a broad overview. (They can overlap, each filter will contain all the data that matches its search terms. For the all filter, just pass an empty string as the only item in the searchTerms array).

filters have an optional tags argument for higher-resolution reporting in New Relic. If you pass a tags array as part of your filter config, the events will be grouped by issue AND all of the tags. For example, you might pass release and os.name as tags (assuming they exist) and you'll be able to analyze issue trends down to the release and OS level. Note: This data will not be passed to Anodot, just to New Relic.

What You End Up With

For each project/filter, the following data is reported to New Relic every five minutes. The data will be available for querying in the Insights application under the type SentryMonitoring.

Total Event Count: Number of events that occurred in the last five minutes that meet the filter criteria
Sentry issues that occurred in the last five minutes along with a link to Sentry, a description, and the number of actual events that occurred in the last five minutes matching this issue (and set of tags, if specified).

For each project/filter, the following data is reported to Anodot every five minutes:

Total Event Count: Number of events that occurred in the last five minutes that meet the filter criteria

Usage

You'll need a webserver to run the job. Any old node server will do for a minimal implementation. Once you have a project, npm install sentry-monitor to get started. In your index.js, add:

const monitor = require('sentry-monitor');


const config = {
  SENTRY_AUTH: 'auth_token_for_sentry_api',
  NEW_RELIC_AUTH: 'new_relic_insert_key',
  NEW_RELIC_ACCOUNT_ID: 'this_is_your_nr_account_id',
  ANODOT_AUTH: 'auth_token_for_anodot_api',
  WSM_AUTH_KEY: 'optional_secret_key',
  org: 'your_sentry_org_name',
  project: 'your_sentry_project_name',
  filters: [
    {
      name: 'MyFilter',
      searchTerms: ['items I want to see', 'MORE_ITEMS'],
      tags: ['optional-sentry-tags-to-further-group-by-in-new-relic']
    }
  ]
};


const app = monitor(config);
app.listen(3000, () => console.log('Listening on port 3000'));

Now set up a cron job that posts to this server every five minutes and you're done!

To run locally: clone, npm install, and set the auth tokens and such in a private config file. To generate an auth token for your Sentry account, visit https://sentry.io/api/.

Warning: If you test it locally, you could be sending data to NR and Anodot when you don't mean to, which will mess up your charts. Add a query parameter debug=true to the your HTTP requests so that data isn't sent and instead is logged to the console.

Multiple Projects

If you have more than one project in your organization, you can monitor all of them by sending an array of projects instead of just one:

const config = {
  ...config,
  org: 'your_sentry_org_name',
  projects: [
    {
      project: 'your_sentry_project_name',
      filters: [
        {
          name: 'MyFilter',
          searchTerms: ['items I want to see', 'MORE_ITEMS']
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      project: 'another_project',
      filters: [
        {
          name: 'SecondProjectsFilter',
          searchTerms: ['items I want to see', 'MORE_ITEMS']
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
};