Sentry is a cloud-based and self-hostable application monitoring platform designed to help developers detect, diagnose, and fix software issues in real time. It provides code-level visibility into application health by capturing errors, exceptions, performance bottlenecks, and user-impacting issues across frontend, backend, and mobile environments.

The platform integrates directly into applications through SDKs for major programming languages and frameworks. Once installed, it automatically captures unhandled errors, stack traces, request context, and user metadata, then aggregates and groups related issues to help developers identify root causes quickly.

Beyond error tracking, Sentry also includes performance monitoring features such as transaction tracing, slow query detection, and latency breakdowns. It can show how specific requests propagate through a system, helping teams understand where slowdowns or failures originate.

Sentry is widely used in production environments to improve reliability and release confidence. It supports integrations with tools like GitHub, Slack, Jira, and CI/CD pipelines, enabling teams to connect error data directly to development workflows and deployments.

It is positioned as an observability tool focused primarily on application-layer visibility rather than full infrastructure monitoring, making it especially useful for debugging code issues rather than managing system-wide infrastructure health.

Key features include:

• Real-time error tracking with stack traces and context
• Performance monitoring and transaction tracing
• Release health tracking to identify bad deployments
• Session replay for reproducing user issues visually
• Alerts and integrations with developer workflow tools

Common use cases include:

• Debugging production errors
• Monitoring application performance
• Tracking regressions after releases
• Diagnosing mobile and web crashes
• Improving software reliability in CI/CD-driven environments

Sentry is developed by Functional Software, Inc. and is available as both a hosted SaaS product and a self-hosted open-source version.