Sentry Metrics - Now in Beta 🔥🔥🔥

[ale-cota]

Sentry’s latest product is now in Alpha. With metrics you can track and visualize the data points you care about over time, making it easier to monitor your application health and identify issues.

You can create custom metrics that matter to your team, like processing time, checkout conversion rate, or user sign ups, and also explore out-of-the-box metrics, like transaction duration.

Processing_time.mov

If you find something interesting, like a spike in processing time, drill into specific events and use correlated traces and other signals like profiles to find the cause of the issue.

Trace_Correlation.mov

Create metric-based alerts to get notified about unexpected changes or spikes and stay ahead of issues. If you want to continuously monitor a particular metric, add the widget to a Dashboard for quick comparison and reference.

Sign-up for the waitlist

Sentry Metrics is currently in Alpha for our Javascript, Python, PHP, .NET, and Rust SDKs. Features are still in-progress and may have bugs so you’ll likely encounter a few - we recognize the irony.

Join our waitlist to be among one of the first to try it out. You’ll be contacted when it’s your turn via email.

Let us know what you think

If you are an early adopter, we’d love to hear what you think. How are you metrics? How is it helping you and your team? How could it be improved?

Please post down below to ask any questions and let us know your thoughts.

[houserx-jmcc]

This sounds great! But I am a little confused how it differs from the custom metrics already in the product, aside from maybe better dashboarding features?

[ale-cota]

Thank you for bringing this up! We recognise that this might be confusing at the moment - definitely something we'll work to improve on in both naming and docs in the short term.

The difference is that custom performance metrics are tied to transactions today and are much more limited. Much like tags they are sent together with the transaction event itself and represent one specific value that you can send. Since transactions are very rich/heavy events, they can also be subject to sampling, so in this case the custom performance metrics are also lost when a transaction is discarded.
Custom metrics are "proper metrics", so you can define them as counters, distributions, gauges or sets. They are sent independently of transactions, are much more lightweight and flexible. You also have richer capabilities in terms of creating alerts and dashboards when using the new custom metrics.

When we first introduced the "legacy" custom performance metrics, we didn't have the intention to create a custom metrics product yet and was somewhat of a bridge solution. In the mid-long term, the goal is to consolidate the two. Hope that helps to clarify the distinction, let me know if you have other questions!

[zaicevas]

What about sampling for (Alpha) custom metrics? Is it sampled by default and is it possible to adjust?

[rix501]

This is super exciting! Are there calculations for metrics? And also, for counter metrics, can we see count?

One thing I would like to do is calculate late sum/count for a specific metric as a success percentage (0 = success, 1 = failure)

[martinbean]

Can you not just emit a distribution metric in that case?

\Sentry\metrics()->distribution(
    key: 'foo',
    value: 87.0,
    unit: \Sentry\Metrics\MetricsUnit::percent(),
)

[rix501]

the issue is I want the percentage across requests

[SamyPesse]

One first feedback: The different JS functions can't be used in a cloudflare worker environment where I/O is not allowed outside the request, it fails with:

Error: Disallowed operation called within global scope. Asynchronous I/O (ex: fetch() or connect()), setting a timeout, and generating random values are not allowed within global scope. To fix this error, perform this operation within a handler. https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/handlers/

I'm trying to find a workaround, but it doesn't look like there is one at the moment.

[ale-cota]

Thanks a lot for sharing this, Samy! @AbhiPrasad do you have any ideas on how to work around this? 🙏

[AbhiPrasad]

Sentry JS SDK does not officially support cloudflare workers yet for metrics - please open a GH issue on the JS SDK repo and we can prioritize accordingly! https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-javascript/issues

[ale-cota]

Thanks for the clarification, @AbhiPrasad! Will create the issue.

[philip-zhan]

Very exciting stuff! Is there any documentation on the equations currently supported?

[AbhiPrasad]

As per https://docs.sentry.io/product/metrics/metrics-explorer-page/ we support the +, -, *, and / operators (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division).

[ale-cota]

Update

We've now transitioned Sentry Metrics from alpha to beta 🚀
Lots of new features such as equation support, multi-query charts and improvements to plotting and trace correlation. We've also added metrics to Ruby, Unity, Java, Android and React-Native 🔥
We're excited to hear your feedback!

[jwarlander]

Great news! I'd love to try it out, but our primary use cases are in Go code, which isn't yet supported 😅 Is it possible at the moment to send metrics manually via an HTTP call in a reasonably straightforward way?

[joshhornby]

Was just coming here to ask the same as @jwarlander - anyway to send metrics via HTTP would be great.

[craigbehnke]

This looks really cool, but I'm curious -- what's the SaaS pricing situation on metrics now/when it goes GA? Will they use Performance Units (if so, how many) or are they included for no extra charge as the docs seem to indicate?

I personally like the free option, but I'm biased.

[ale-cota]

Hi Craig,
Thanks for the question! Metrics is currently free while we are in the beta phase, however we will start charging for them after GA (targeting early June). The exact pricing model is not yet finalised, but they will be charged separately from Performance Units.

[klemmchr]

Metrics look great so far. The only thing that is a bit confusing to me is the default view that can be saved. This functionality is not scoped to the project but for the user (or for everyone, can't say for sure). This is a bit clunky since switching between projects also retains the metrics displayed. We have projects where metrics vary drastically from each other. For me a functionality like a project scoped default view is missing right now.

[george-silva]

Nice work! Will metrics be available on on-premise installations?

[Artein]

This feature looks really interesting. We are checking it out while the feature is in Beta and free.
Anyway, I don't like the restrictions on a metric's name.

1. If the name has '/' or ' ' (space), each character will be replaced with '_' (underscore).
   So, in my case when I want to calculate total endpoint price, it is messed with other metrics (my endpoints start with 'api/')

2. If the name of metric is long, it is being cut and only via hovering mouse over it you can read the whole name

3. For development and staging environments would be great to update metrics in UI way quicker than it is now (5 minutes?)

4. If tag name contains ' ' (space), I can't group by that tag

Overall, it looks not that readable atm and should be improved.
@ale-cota, do I miss something and I can improve that on my end?

[flygerian]

Hi! Is there a way to maybe send metrics over an HTP request? I migrated my project from python to Go, and I can see that metrics is not supported by the Go SDK, bit metrics are super important to my project currently

[icebob]

An HTTP metrics endpoint would be great because it allows to send metrics from any languages, any framework without an SDK.

[jkytomak]

Is there way to get same browser.name and geo.country_code tags as in performance metrics added to custom metrics?