Request Metrics vs. Sentry

Request Metrics is great for small web development teams that want to make fast web applications. It was quick for us to get started and we could use the reports right away without having to read through documentation. If you just need to get some performance metrics, Request Metrics is perfect. It would not be so good for a larger team or a complex backend application as it is pretty limited in what it can measure.

[Sentry] is honestly an amazing product. It allows us to detect errors in real time complete with stack traces and any extra accompanying information the developer wants to provide in the alert. With the alerting into Slack it has allowed us to quickly triage and tag in people who need eyes on a specific issue. It would be really useful in any Saas product environment.

Incentivized

• Performance charts are really simple and easy for us to understand what is happening
• It was easy to get started and doesn't need administration or training
• It's affordable for our team
• It's fast

• It collects very detailed information on problems that happen to our users while using the platform
• It supplies very good tools in order to aggregate the collected data and analyze it
• It integrates with Slack, making it easier to "monitor it in real time"

Incentivized

• I wish that it could also do uptime checking of the site
• There is not enough detail to drill into individual users

• if we could decrease the costing via some kind of sampling of errors.
• sometimes same error is in loop and Sentry will count all the events for pricing if there is any way this can be reduced.
• self hosted capabilities or using own storage to reduce cost.

Incentivized

We also consider Speedcurve and Calibre for monitoring. Speedcurve was really nice, but the reports were slow. We had to wait a lot to get information. It was also out of our budget and would require extra justification to use it. Calibre was also nice, but the numbers were based on synthetic rather than real user performance. We felt that this wasn't as helpful for us.

We actually ended up using both because New Relic is a more robust overall IT infrastructure monitoring product. However, sentry is more developer oriented on the backend and more client friendly on the front end as far as showing results and the dashboard etc. It can provide product level insights that New Relic does not.

Incentivized

• The launch of our project dashboard was much smoother and more successful because we could fix problems earlier
• It fit without our existing operations budget

• Error tracking is a must in any modern dynamic website or app. By looking into the error notifications I'm able to fix errors before anyone even has a chance to complain about them!
• Surprisingly, many website issues aren't showing up in Sentry, because they don't trigger exceptions. I'm interested in seeing if I can use Sentry to catch manually-triggered exceptions for "undesirable states" that my website can find itself in. Of course, that means I have to figure out how to have my client code recognize that it's in an undesirable state...

Incentivized