Integration of Sentry into React and Express applications for error and performance monitoring
Setup of Sentry to handle and report errors and exceptions automatically
Utilization of source maps to transform minified errors into readable stack traces
Use of Sentry for comprehensive transaction monitoring and performance insights
Creation of alerts and dashboards to track application health and errors
Monitoring the performance and errors in an application is crucial for developers aiming to maintain a seamless user experience. Incorporating tools like Sentry into applications can significantly enhance the tracking and management of errors and performance issues. This article delves into the process of setting up Sentry in a React front-end and an Express back-end, highlighting the key aspects of this integration and its benefits.
To start, integrating Sentry into an application is straightforward, whether using React or Express. The first step involves installing the necessary packages using npm or yarn and initializing Sentry. The initialization process includes setting up the Data Source Name (DSN), which is crucial for connecting your application with Sentry's monitoring services. For React applications, this typically occurs in the index.js file, allowing Sentry to begin tracking errors and transactions as soon as possible.
In addition to error tracking, Sentry offers robust performance monitoring capabilities. By enabling tracing integration, developers can track 100% of the application's transactions. This setup allows for the automatic creation of transactions for page loads, navigation events, and backend requests. By capturing this data, developers gain insights into the user experience and can identify potential bottlenecks in the application.
A key feature of Sentry's error monitoring is the use of source maps. When code is minified for production, errors can become difficult to trace back to their original source. By uploading source maps to Sentry, developers can transform these minified errors into readable stack traces. This process provides valuable context, such as the exact location in the code where an error occurred, making it easier to troubleshoot and resolve issues.
Beyond error tracking, Sentry enables the monitoring of application transactions. Each request and activity within the application becomes a span, allowing developers to understand the sequence of events leading to an error or slowdown. This level of detail is particularly useful in identifying performance issues, as developers can see which parts of the application are consuming the most time.
Setting up alerts and dashboards is another powerful feature offered by Sentry. Developers can create alerts for real-time error notifications, ensuring they are immediately aware of issues as they occur. Dashboards provide a visual representation of application health, displaying data such as crash-free sessions, transaction durations, and error occurrences. These tools offer a comprehensive view of application performance, aiding developers in maintaining and improving their applications.
Sentry's integration extends beyond basic error and performance monitoring. For instance, in a microservice environment, Sentry can trace requests across multiple services, providing a holistic view of the application's performance. Additionally, Sentry integrates with various third-party services like Slack, JIRA, and GitHub, streamlining the workflow for developers by allowing them to receive notifications, create issues, and link code changes directly from Sentry.
Incorporating Sentry into a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline can further enhance its utility. By monitoring applications during the deployment process, developers can ensure that releases do not introduce new errors or regressions. This integration helps maintain application stability and performance, even as new features are rolled out.
Overall, Sentry provides a comprehensive solution for monitoring application performance and errors. Its integration capabilities, detailed transaction tracking, and ability to transform minified errors into readable stack traces make it an invaluable tool for developers. By using Sentry, developers can ensure their applications remain robust and user-friendly, ultimately leading to a better user experience.
We’ll go through setting up Sentry step--step to get visibility into our frontend and backend. Once integrated, we will track and triage errors + transactions surfaced Sentry from our services to understand why/where/how errors and slowdowns occurred within our application code.
This workshop has been presented at Node Congress 2022, check out the latest edition of this JavaScript Conference.
FAQ
Sentry is a tool that helps developers track issues in their applications such as crashes, errors, and performance issues. It provides visibility and context needed to identify why issues occur, where in the code they happen, and who is affected, allowing developers to fix issues and improve the application.
To integrate Sentry into a JavaScript application, you install the Sentry SDK using npm or yarn, initialize it in your application's entry file (like index.js), and configure it with a DSN (a unique key) provided by Sentry. This setup allows Sentry to capture errors and performance issues in your application.
Source maps are files that map minified code back to the original source code. They are important for Sentry because they enable the tool to translate errors from the minified production code back to the readable source code, helping developers understand and fix issues more efficiently.
Yes, Sentry can be integrated with both front-end and back-end components of an application. For instance, it can monitor JavaScript applications on the front end and Node.js servers on the back end, capturing errors and performance issues across the full stack.
In a production environment, Sentry captures errors as they occur, processes and aggregates them, and then alerts developers in real-time. This allows developers to quickly address issues that could affect user experience or system stability.
Sentry provides insights into the adoption and impact of new releases. It tracks error rates, performance issues, and user sessions to determine if a release is healthier or if new issues have been introduced, helping teams make informed decisions about their deployments.
Yes, Sentry supports integrations with many other tools such as Slack, GitHub, and JIRA. These integrations help streamline workflows by allowing developers to receive alerts, assign issues, and track deployments directly within the tools they are already using.
Sentry's performance monitoring features allow developers to track slow transactions and other performance issues in real time. This helps in identifying bottlenecks in the application, understanding the impact of code changes on performance, and optimizing the user experience.
Today's Workshop focused on application monitoring using Sentry. The importance of tracking errors, slowdowns, and releases was highlighted, along with the integration process for React, Express, and Node.js applications. The debugging capabilities of Sentry were demonstrated, including identifying errors, slowdowns, and debugging backend issues. Monitoring releases, querying data, and visualizing information were also covered, along with the integration of Sentry with workflow tools. The Q&A session addressed various topics, including the use of Sentry in different environments and its integration with other tools.
Today we'll discuss tracking user experience in Node and JavaScript apps, including crashes, errors, exceptions, and slow page loads. We'll integrate Sentry, solve errors and slowdowns, and understand how releases are affected. Feel free to ask questions.
2. Essentials of Application Monitoring
In this part, we'll discuss the need for application monitoring and the challenges developers face without it. We'll explore the unreadable stack traces, slowdowns, and errors that often go unnoticed. We'll also highlight the importance of context and how Sentry can provide the necessary tools to identify and resolve issues. Throughout the workshop, we'll focus on solving errors, slowdowns, and tracking the adoption of releases. To follow along, create your own Express and React apps, sign up for Sentry, and create two projects. Let's dive into the documentation and explore the integration into the PlantStore app.
3. Integrating Sentry into React and Express
To integrate Sentry into your React or Express application, you need to install the necessary packages, initialize Sentry with your project's DSN and project ID, enable tracing integration for performance monitoring, and upload source maps. The source maps can be generated during the build process and uploaded to Sentry using either the webpack plugin or the CLI tool. I will provide a detailed demonstration shortly.
4. Integrating Sentry into Node.js and Express
Let's go through the instructions for integrating Sentry into a Node.js and Express application. We'll attach the request and error handlers, showcase the React and Express integration, and highlight the importance of tracking errors and slowdowns in the context of releases and environments. We'll also cover uploading source maps and creating an Auth token for sending data to the Sentry organization. On the Express side, we'll initialize Sentry for performance monitoring. Additionally, we'll attach context and use router instrumentation for React and Redux applications.
5. Workflow and Error Solving
After integrating Sentry, errors, transactions, and sessions will be sent up. Crash-free sessions, transactions, and errors can be viewed in one place. We'll solve for errors, slowdowns, and explore release adoption. We'll also assemble queries, dashboards, and demonstrate integrations. Let's start by reviewing an error on the homepage. With Sentry, we receive automatic notifications for errors. We can view detailed information about the error, including its impact and specific details. Source maps allow us to view readable code and understand the context of the error.
6. Debugging Checkout and Backend Errors
And we can go down through as necessary. An error was thrown on errors JS line 14. The context that Sentry was able to capture includes the redux state and user agent information. As a developer, I now know the who, what, when, where, and why. Let's increase the complexity and debug why the checkout was broken. We did not get a good response from the backend. I'm able to hop from the frontend to the backend and see exactly what was going on. We were trying to buy items without enough inventory. Variable values in the stack trace are complicated in Node and JavaScript Lint. Express land server, JS line 177 is where this happened.
7. Debugging Application Slowdown
We're now going to debug a slowdown in the application. Using Sentry, we analyze the performance of the front-end project and identify that the user remissory index is high, taking about seven seconds to load. We examine the duration breakdown, toggle web vitals, and filter the largest contentful paint (LCP) metrics. We discover that an HTTP request is consuming significant time and occurring frequently. By drilling into the request, we observe the timeline of browser actions, resource imports, and rendering. The largestContentfulPaint check fails, indicating a performance issue.
QnA
Debugging Slowdowns and Errors
We can see the DOM content being loaded and the back-end transaction causing the slowdown. We have the context of the slowdown in one page. There were questions about minified production code and sending data to Google Analytics. The front-end checkout transaction is slow with related errors. We can drill down into the transactions and view the full trace. Errors and slowdowns are in the same platform, providing the whole picture. Monitoring errors and transactions helps identify the cause of slowdowns. Next, we'll discuss releases and anonymizing user emails for GDPR compliance.
Monitoring Releases and Querying Data
You can monitor releases in Sentry, analyze session information, adoption rates, crash rates, and metrics. Errors, slow transactions, and other issues are aggregated and easily debugged. Query and analyze data in discover, set alerts, and create dashboards. Understand customer errors, browser breakdowns, and popular errors. Sentry provides powerful data querying capabilities. Set custom tags to filter data. Analyze customer types and count unique users.
Debugging Errors and Failure Rates
These are the ones paying us the most amount of money. Let's see how they're experiencing the various browsers. Most of them are using Chrome and experiencing errors. I can set alerts and add this to dashboards. Now let's query the transaction data to determine the failure rates. By filtering on event type.transaction, we can easily construct queries. The checkout transaction is failing often. Let's see if it's happening in all releases. It's occurring in three releases over the last 14 days at a rate of 75%. We need to investigate what was introduced.
Data Visualization and Workflow Integration
In this section, we explore the front-end and back-end data visualization capabilities of Sentry. We can customize the display of issue data, browser breakdowns, transactions, and web vitals. Real-time alerts are triggered when errors occur during application runtime, and developers are notified within seconds. We also demonstrate how Sentry integrates with popular workflow tools like GitHub, Slack, PagerDuty, and JIRA. By leveraging rich context and stack trace linking, developers can quickly identify the cause of errors, assign them to the appropriate team members, and track the resolution process.
Using Sentry and Q&A
Let's pretend to Will. I just click done. Bam. Now it's done within Sentry as well. Long story short, we want to make sure the developer gets notified, has the context they need, has the information they need. They can trace it. They can fix it. They know what commit caused it, get the right firefighter on the job, and go back to development, or playing racquetball, or whatever it was that you're doing. Can you use Sentry for CICD? So a Sentry is an application monitoring tool, so when you deploy into any of your environments, Sentry will tell it you know that you're having these slowdowns or errors. Looks like Santiago asked, is Sentry a complement of some other tools such as Datadog or New Relic, or is Sentry a replacement for those APM tools? Good question. How would it work in a microservice environment? So as you saw earlier, I was debugging a 500 error. Serverless? Good question. Ignaz asks, can you set this up with Slack, email, and Discord? Exactly. How does it work with server-side rendering? Santiago asked, does Sentry provide an interface to create synthetic events or a mechanism that I can use to create kernel events to Sentry? Synthetic events, not quite. Yeah, no problem, Santiago. Any other questions at this point in time? Hopefully, I was able to show everyone how you all can use Sentry and not have to, you know, deal with this anymore and can then get in front of these problems, know about them, and, you know, help put out better releases or respond to releases.
DB Integration in Express
If you have a DB connected, Sentry will report slowness there. Let's go to Express and check the DB integration. In the documentation, there's a database integration for Node.js and Express. This is the one you're looking for.
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