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Monitoring Sentry with collectd

Integrating Sentry and collectd with your monitoring system

To integrate Sentry and collectd with your monitoring system, please reach out to MetricFire. Book a demo with the MetricFire team to discuss integrating Sentry and collectd and how that can support your monitoring system.

What is Sentry?

Sentry is an application monitoring platform designed for the specific purpose of monitoring performance and errors. It is intended to make life simpler for developers during the process of creating new software and apps, increasing their ability to meet deadlines with minimal stress. 

 

The Sentry platform enables developers to diagnose, correct, and optimize code performance quickly and efficiently, which is crucial in reducing or eliminating issues for end-users once the application reaches the marketplace. After all, the faster you can successfully diagnose issues that are slowing your app down, including bugs or security breaches, the faster you will see success. 

 

Sentry is a top choice for app developers, as it supports 30+ coding languages. Better still, it integrates with a variety of popular tools such as Slack, Jira, and GitHub.

 

At last count, Sentry is used by more than one million developers, and there are 60,000 organizations in 146 countries that rely on Sentry to maximize the quality of their software. Some of the best-known companies in the world count themselves among Sentry’s clients. Examples include Disney, Peloton, Cloudflare, and Microsoft. 

  

Sentry identifies issues and errors in software applications and alerts developers as to the root cause. Once errors have been defined, Sentry supports recovery. Sentry assists with understanding how users have been impacted by errors through the tracking of field data. This includes variable network speeds, the typical browsers being used, the digital devices, and the location of users. 

 

This is managed through Google’s Web Vitals, giving developers deep insight into the user experience. Users may be frustrated by slow loading times, or they may not be able to interact with the page at all. In some cases, the software performs well with certain browsers or devices, but they struggle with others. Sentry increases clients’ ability to adjust and rework in a timely manner, ensuring rapid resolution. 

 

MetricFire’s complete infrastructure and application monitoring platform makes it easy to integrate Sentry. Simply enable a Sentry webhook from the add-ons section of your Hosted Graphite account. MetricFire's advanced filtering lets you choose only the data views you want to see and discard the rest. You can also set up simple rules to discard data you no longer keep, plus receive alerts via email or Slack.

 

How to set up a Sentry webhook

The webhook provided by Hosted Graphite can be used in Sentry as an alerting endpoint. To add Sentry alert information to Hosted Graphite as annotations, follow these instructions

Navigate to the Add-ons section of your Hosted Graphite account and copy your Sentry webhook location by clicking the ‘Copy’ button and follow the mouseover directions

Adding an Alerting Endpoint (in your Sentry account)

Browse to your Sentry account, visit ‘Project Settings’ section, and click ‘All Integrations’

Scroll down to ‘WebHooks’ and make sure the tickbox is checked. Save changes if necessary.

Browse to the Alerts settings

Scroll down, and add the Hosted Graphite Sentry webhook location to the field. Don’t forget to save your changes.

Scroll back up and either add or edit an alert Rule that corresponds to the Events you want to send to Hosted Graphite. Only alerts you send will appear on your graphs, so choose triggers and intervals that make sense for your use case.

Ensure the notification is being sent through WebHooks. (You can send it to other services too, if you’d like.)

You’ve now saved a Hosted Graphite webhook for your alerting endpoint and assigned it to an alert. Now, once you’ve triggered some alerts, you can plot them on your graphs.

To View Sentry Annotations in Your Dashboards

Browse to your Hosted Graphite graph and open the Annotations dialog

Create and name a new annotation, and query on any tag to see your Sentry alerts

Sentry tags are sent as (key, value) pairs, but Hosted Graphite annotations are a series of strings. If your events are tagged with (room: "356B"), you’ll be able to query it using room=356B. By default we store the project slug, server name, error level, and the word “sentry” so you can quickly filter annotations for your dashboards.

Finally, you will see Sentry events on your graph

More information on annotations can be found by following our annotations documentation.

What is collectd?

Collectd is system statistics collection daemon that periodically retrieves system and application performance metrics and then stores them using various storage solutions such as RRD files. Collectd is a free open-source project. It can gather metrics from multiple sources, including operating systems, applications, log files, and external devices. You can use the statistics compiled by collectd to monitor systems, detect performance bottlenecks, and predict future system loads.

 

Because it's written in C, collectd is built for performance and portability, allowing you to run it on systems with no scripting language or an embedded system. It comes with optimizations and features to handle hundreds of thousands of metrics. Collectd also lets you configure what metrics you want to capture and what frequency you want to capture them, allowing you to scale back your metrics collection collect only the metrics that make sense for your business needs. Its modular architecture allows the daemon to use only the resources required to do the job.

  

Collectd only performs the collection and transmission of the metrics. It does not analyze or present the metrics on its own. But by integrating collectd with the Metricfire platform, you can enjoy metrics displayed on aesthetically pleasing dashboards. Our integration lets you view metrics on essential systems and application log messages on your Hosted Graphite graphs and dashboards. 

 

You can download a collectd configuration file pre-filled with your Hosted Graphite account details on our add-ons page. This configuration comes with several collectd plugins enabled, including CPU, DF (file system usage), disk, entropy, interface, load, memory, processes, rrdtool, swap, users and write_graphite.

 

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How to integrate Sentry and collectd with your monitoring system

To integrate Sentry and collectd with your monitoring system, sign up for a free trial with MetricFire. Talk with the MetricFire team about how to integrate Sentry and collectd and get Sentry and collectd interacting with your MetricFire dashboards directly.

What is MetricFire?

MetricFire is a full-scale platform that provides infrastructure, system, and application monitoring using a suite of open-source monitoring tools. We enable you to use Hosted Graphite and aesthetic custom dashboards to visualize your metrics so you can understand what is happening.

 

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MetricFire offers a complete ecosystem of end-to-end infrastructure monitoring, comprised of open-source Graphite and popular dashboards. Plugins for many other open-source projects are preconfigured, such as StatsD, collectd, and more. Not only does MetricFire fit well into many monitoring use cases, such as server monitoring, but we also offer application and cloud infrastructure monitoring.

         

Through this hosted environment, MetricFire boosts the unique features of open-source projects to give you more functionality than the original products. Below are some of the MetricFire features at a glance: 

  • Cloud Monitoring

  • Hosted Graphite

  • Dashboards


The key thing to remember is that Hosted Graphite by MetricFire is more than just Graphite. Our Hosted Graphite product actually adds data dimensionality and better data storage.

       

Benefits of Using MetricFire:

  • Simple, low-cost pricing
    A structured pricing model based on unique time series metrics allows you to work within your budget. The predictability and transparent pricing allow you to keep your costs in check and plan for the future. 1 metric is 1 metric.


  • Easy-to-use dashboards
    Easily share your dashboards with clients for free.


  • Responsive alerting
    Alert notification integrations PagerDuty, Slack, email, and webhooks.


  • Freedom of customization
    Custom metrics through your code.


  • Fantastic customer support
    Highly available support is provided by engineers for engineers to get you set up quickly.


  • Enterprise-ready
    Dedicated clusters for users that need their own environment. 
      
The author for this testimonial, Jim Davies, Head of DevOps, MoneySuperMarket.com.
“As MetricFire scales effortlessly, we can push and store more metrics than we really need today but might need tomorrow. This increases our depth of understanding of the systems that we run and heads off any future problems.”
Jim Davies, Head of DevOps, MoneySuperMarket.com.

Don't just take our word for it

Why thousands of engineers choose us:

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Vendor lock-in's not our thing. We’re believers in you still owning your data, so you can request a full export at any time. That means you get all the benefits of an open-source tool, but with the security and stability of a SaaS tool.

“We now have over ten times the amount of metrics we started with, and on different accounts. One of the great things about MetricFire is that scaling to support this increase has been hassle-free, requiring no additional work on our side.”

Maxime Audet, Cloud-Ops Team Lead, Coveo

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Save valuable engineering time and stick within your budget. We're known for our predictable and transparent pricing so it's easy to keeps costs under control.

“Building and managing an on-premise installation at this scale would require a lot of engineer time, especially in the first year...we use this engineering time to work on initiatives closer to our core business”

Jim Davies, Head of DevOps, MoneySuperMarket.com

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Transparency is at the root of how we operate: from pricing to postmortems we're open about how we do things. We even publish our internal system metrics to our public status page.

“There’s complete transparency with everything MetricFire do which means we can accurately predict what we’ll be spending and comfortably keep within our budget.”

Itai Yaffe, Big Data Developer, Nielsen

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Our first line, technical support comes from engineers, for engineers. So you get highly detailed, expert support when you need it.

"Every time I have a question, I get an answer from support after just a couple of hours. Their technical knowledge is excellent.”

Shahar Kobrinsky, VP of Architecture and Scale, Eyeview

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Questions?

Don’t see the integration you’re looking for? Need help setting up your monitoring? Get in touch and one of our engineers will help you out.

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