Track Slowdowns and Crashes in your React apps

In this lightning talk, you will see:

  • The lack of visibility on React applications
  • How to install the Sentry React SDK
  • How Sentry can help you identify errors and slowdowns within your React App so you can see faster, solve quicker and continuously learn from your applications

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Video Summary and Transcription
The video introduces Sentry as a platform that enhances code observability, particularly focusing on React applications. It emphasizes how Sentry improves error monitoring by providing detailed error reports with stack traces, which are more readable due to source maps. This helps developers quickly identify and solve issues. Sentry also offers performance monitoring tools that provide insights into application health metrics, such as Web Vitals and latency distribution. Distributed tracing is another feature highlighted, which helps track requests through different services, offering visibility into how backend issues affect the frontend. The video explains how integrating Sentry into an application can optimize both developer and customer experience by enabling real-time alerts and efficient error handling. Additionally, it mentions that Sentry can integrate with other issue tracking tools, helping streamline the debugging process.

FAQ

Sentry is a platform designed to enhance code observability, focusing on understanding the health of applications from the front end to the back end. It supports all major programming languages and frameworks, particularly React, and provides tools for error monitoring and performance monitoring.

By integrating Sentry's SDK into your application, it allows for real-time alerts and enables developers to swiftly identify and address issues, optimizing both the developer and customer experience through efficient error handling and performance insights.

Sentry provides detailed error reporting including stack traces, the frequency of errors, affected users, and contextual tags. It also supports source maps for unminifying stack traces, making them easier to read and understand.

Sentry's performance monitoring tools offer insights into application health metrics like Web Vitals, latency distribution, and user misery scores. It also provides detailed transaction timelines and operation breakdowns to pinpoint performance bottlenecks.

Distributed tracing in Sentry helps track a request's journey through different services, providing visibility into how issues in the backend affect the frontend. This feature is crucial for identifying and resolving errors that occur across various parts of an application stack.

Sentry allows users to set up customized alerts that notify team members of issues in real time. These alerts can be configured to highlight critical problems, ensuring that they are addressed promptly to minimize impact on the application's performance and user experience.

Yes, Sentry offers integration capabilities with various issue tracking platforms. This allows developers to link errors and performance issues directly to tickets, streamline the debugging process, and collaborate more effectively on resolving issues.

1. Introduction to Sentry and Code Observability#

Short description:

Hi, I'm Simon, a Solutions Engineer at Sentry. We focus on code observability, supporting all major languages and frameworks, including React. With Sentry, you can monitor errors and performance of your application. Let's take a look at a React app in an ecommerce site. We encountered an error, but with Sentry, we can easily investigate using developer tools and get a summary of the error.

Hi there, my name is Simon. I'm a Solutions Engineer at Sentry. What we focus on is code observability. With Sentry, you can understand the health of your application from the front end to the back end. Sentry is designed for all developers, meaning we support all major languages and frameworks, including and especially React.

With the Sentry SDK on your application, you can alert the necessary team members and enable developers to optimize that developer and customer experience. The Sentry platform provides multiple perspectives on the health of your application, but what we'll be focusing on today is error monitoring and performance monitoring.

With that in mind, I have a React app for us to take a look at, and it's in this ecommerce site. So let's click in and browse our products, and browse our products. Okay, it's taken a long time for this to load. We'll have to look into that a bit later, but we'll just have to continue on with the user flow here eventually. Okay, I'll add a couple items to our cart here, proceed to checkout, and I think we'll proceed to checkout. Okay, this is a horrible demo site, obviously. We encountered an error, surprise, surprise. But let's take off our end-user hat for a moment, put on our developer hat, and see what's going on. Let's open our developer tools, look at the console, reproduce it. Look at the network tab, cross-reference our source code. I mean, there's plenty of things we can do and it gets a bit tedious. Thankfully we've got Sentry set up and we can do it all in that one place. I'll show you how we got started. That's in the Sentry documentation page, docs.sentry.io. Write it down. In any case, we've got our supported platforms in this button here. Pride of place, we have React on the front page, so you don't have to go far. Click into that, it's an easy installation, NPM install or Yarn add and a few lines of code to configure it.

What this will do is get Sentry on your application, hook it on to your global error handler. As users are interacting with your application, events and transactions are sent to Sentry and that's where we can look and understand the health of our application. So during that checkout fiasco, we did get notified through an alert that was set up. We don't have time today through this lightning talk to go into alerts, but just know that it's there. We've got our summary of our error right away, including the magnitude, how many times it's happened, to how many users, contextual tags as well.

2. Understanding the Stack Trace with Sentry#

Short description:

In a Sentry-less world, we'd get a minified stack trace, which is not easy to understand. But with Sentry, we can upload source maps and get a human-readable stack trace that highlights the exact line of the error.

We can add our own tags if we'd like, but let's just skip ahead and go to what we're all thinking about. That's the stack trace. In a Sentry-less world, we'd get minified stack trace, which is not the funnest thing to understand. But during our build process, we've uploaded our source maps and Sentry's able to take our source maps against the stack trace that was provided and unminify in this beautiful stack trace we've got here, human-readable, highlighting the exact line that it hit on for this error. We've even got this if statement details on that, and the response that okay was false.

Simon Zhong
Simon Zhong
8 min
25 Oct, 2021

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