Make your Issue stream more actionable with priority

[rachrwang]

Overview

Our aim at Sentry is to surface important issues for customers to review, triage, and fix. Given the volume of issues being created each day, it can be difficult to isolate critical issues from less important ones. Existing metadata, like log level, are helpful but imperfect tools for prioritization. A fatal issue might be less important to resolve than an error, if the latter is escalating in volume and impacting a significant number of users.

As part of making Sentry more actionable, we’ve been investing in our ability to classify issues into different priority levels. Priority is determined by factors like log level, trends in error volume, error message, and historical actions taken on similar issues.

There are three priority levels for issues in Sentry:

• High: Issues that are likely to be actionable and require immediate attention.
• Medium: Issues that are likely to be actionable and require attention in the near future.
• Low: Issues that don't require immediate attention.

We’ll be releasing this functionality to early adopters, starting the week of April 15. You can learn more here.

How will this impact your experience?

Sentry will be filtering out low priority issues from the default view of the issue stream. In addition, you can modify the priority of individual or multiple issues, which can then be used to search or filter on the stream. Over time, Sentry will be learning from actions taken to modify priority to improve the experience.

Have feedback for the Sentry team?

We’d love to learn more about how the new priority experience is working for you, and what we can do to make it even better. Some questions we have for our early adopter customers are:

1. Is your default issue stream more actionable with a priority filter? Why or why not?
2. Are there cases where you think priority is misclassified? Can you share examples?
3. Is modifying priority a useful part of your workflow?
4. Is there anything you’d want the Sentry team to change about the current implementation of priority?