This workshop equips participants to integrate Sentry into an application and establish a practical monitoring and debugging workflow. Participants configure error monitoring, enrich diagnostic context, investigate application failures, trace performance bottlenecks, and connect monitoring to releases and deployment processes.
The workshop uses a sample web application with a backend service. It concludes with a capstone that brings together application instrumentation, issue investigation, alerting, and release verification.
Duration 3 Days – 21 hrs.
Objectives
- Explain Sentry’s role in application observability and software reliability.
- Configure Sentry organizations, projects, environments, and SDK integrations.
- Capture application exceptions and enrich events with useful diagnostic context.
- Investigate issues using stack traces, breadcrumbs, tags, and source maps.
- Configure tracing to investigate slow requests and application bottlenecks.
- Use Session Replay to understand browser interactions associated with errors.
- Connect application issues to releases and deployments.
- Configure actionable alerts and issue ownership.
- Apply data filtering, privacy controls, and sampling settings.
- Implement an end-to-end monitoring workflow for a sample application.
Target Audience
- Frontend, backend, and full-stack developers.
- Software engineers and application support engineers.
- DevOps engineers and site reliability engineers.
- Quality assurance engineers with programming experience.
- Technical leads responsible for application reliability and production troubleshooting.
Prerequisites
- Working knowledge of at least one programming language.
- Basic understanding of web applications, APIs, and HTTP requests.
- Experience installing dependencies and running an application locally.
- Familiarity with Git and basic software build processes.
- Basic knowledge of exceptions, logging, and debugging.
- A laptop with a code editor, Git, and the runtime required for the workshop application.
- Access to a Sentry account with permission to create or configure projects.
Course Outline
Day 1: Sentry Foundations and Error Monitoring
Module 1: Introduction to Sentry and Application Observability
- Application observability and common troubleshooting challenges.
- Errors, events, issues, traces, and diagnostic context.
- Sentry organizations, teams, and projects.
- Planning monitoring coverage for a sample application.
Module 2: Project Setup and Application Integration
- Creating projects and selecting SDKs.
- Understanding the Data Source Name (DSN).
- Installing and initializing frontend and backend SDKs.
- Configuring environments and application identifiers.
- Generating and verifying initial error events.
- Troubleshooting common integration problems.
Module 3: Capturing Errors and Enriching Context
- Automatic exception capture and manual reporting.
- Capturing handled exceptions and diagnostic messages.
- Adding breadcrumbs, tags, and contextual information.
- Applying user context with appropriate privacy controls.
- Filtering unnecessary events and sensitive data.
- Generating representative application failures.
Module 4: Issue Investigation and Debugging
- Navigating issue lists and event details.
- Interpreting stack traces and breadcrumbs.
- Understanding issue grouping and recurring failures.
- Generating and uploading JavaScript source maps.
- Investigating errors in a production build.
- Fixing a sample defect and confirming the result.
Day 2: Tracing, Performance Investigation, and User Context
Module 5: Tracing Configuration and Instrumentation
- Trace and span concepts.
- Enabling supported automatic instrumentation.
- Configuring trace sampling.
- Adding custom spans to application operations.
- Propagating trace context between frontend and backend services.
- Verifying trace continuity.
Module 6: Investigating Application Performance
- Exploring traces and individual spans.
- Identifying slow endpoints and operations.
- Investigating database and external service delays.
- Connecting application errors to related traces.
- Comparing behavior before and after a performance improvement.
Module 7: Session Replay for Browser Applications
- Configuring Session Replay in a supported browser application.
- Setting replay sampling and privacy options.
- Reviewing user interactions surrounding an error.
- Correlating replays with issues and traces.
- Troubleshooting missing or incomplete replay data.
Module 8: Monitoring Configuration and Data Quality
- Selecting useful tags and consistent environment names.
- Balancing diagnostic coverage and event volume.
- Reducing low-value events.
- Reviewing data scrubbing and masking settings.
- Troubleshooting missing events and incomplete context.
- Refining the sample application’s monitoring configuration.
Day 3: Releases, Alerts, and Capstone Build
Module 9: Release and Deployment Integration
- Defining consistent release identifiers.
- Associating events with application releases.
- Connecting releases with commits and deployments.
- Automating source map uploads in a build pipeline.
- Managing authentication tokens securely.
- Investigating issues introduced by a deployment.
Module 10: Alerts, Ownership, and Operational Workflows
- Configuring error and performance alerts.
- Selecting thresholds and notification destinations.
- Establishing issue ownership and team routing.
- Prioritizing issues by frequency and user impact.
- Managing issue resolution and regressions.
- Creating a practical incident investigation workflow.
Module 11: Capstone — Build a Sentry-Monitored Application
- Integrate Sentry into a sample frontend and backend application.
- Configure environments, releases, and diagnostic context.
- Capture intentional application errors.
- Upload source maps and inspect readable stack traces.
- Trace a request across application components.
- Identify and improve a performance bottleneck.
- Configure privacy controls and actionable alerts.
- Deploy a corrected release and verify monitoring results.
- Prepare an operational handover covering configuration and troubleshooting.
