Hosted Graphite + Sentry: Event and error tracking on your dashboards

November 21, 2017
Monitoring

When we ask our customers what they use to track errors and events on their sites, Sentry is typically the answer. That’s why we’ve added it as our latest integration: you can display your Sentry events on the same dashboards and graphs that your application performance is displayed on, giving you more information about the cause of potential problems.

For example, a spike in errors recorded by Sentry would be more useful when you can view it as part of a graph of your overall traffic and error rates. With two clicks from your dashboard, you're in Sentry and looking at the exact cause of the blip on your graphs.

How it works

When the integration is configured, all new Sentry events will be sent to Hosted Graphite. That means errors and exceptions are available to include in your Hosted Graphite dashboards. Additionally, our Annotations API gives you and your team the context you need to figure out what's caused something strange in your graphs — or to rule something out. Annotations let you connect your metrics to specific events (for example, when you deploy code, run some tests, or a long-running job completes) and have the following properties:

  • title - (required) A short summary of the annotation.
  • description - A more in-depth description of the annotation.
  • tags - A single word or multiple short strings to organize different types of events. e.g. ‘deployments’, ‘feature’, ‘test’ etc.
  • start_time - Unix timestamp describing when the event occurred. If this is not specified, the time of event creation is used.
  • end_time - Optional timestamp describing when the event completed.

The Sentry annotation description also has a link to the Sentry event itself, so you can dig a little deeper if you need more context and information.

Setting up Hosted Graphite’s Sentry integration

It only takes a few minutes to add the Sentry integration to your Hosted Graphite account. Follow the steps below to get set up.

Go to the add-ons section of your Hosted Graphite account:

A screenshot of Hosted Graphite's Add-Ons page with a circle pointing at the 'Add-Ons' feature in the side-navbar

Activate Sentry by clicking the ‘Enable’ button:

A screenshot of Hosted Graphite's 'Setting up an alert in Sentry' panel with an arrow pointing at the 'Enable Sentry' button

Copy your Sentry webhook location by clicking the ‘Copy’ button and follow the mouseover directions:

A screenshot of Hosted Graphite's 'Setting up an alert in Sentry' panel with an arrow pointing to the 'Copy' button to copy Hosted Graphite's URL to the clipboard

Adding an Alerting Endpoint (in your Sentry account)

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

A screenshot of Sentry's configuration menu with an arrow pointing at 'All Intergrations'

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

A screenshot of Sentry's 'All integrations' page with a circle around 'WebHooks' and an arrow pointing at the tick box to make sure the user has it checked

Browse to the Alerts settings:

A screen shot of a user's Sentry Sandbox Configuration page with an arrow pointing at 'Alerts'

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

A screenshot of Sentry's Webhook field with Hosted Graphite's webhook url pasted in and an arrow pointing to 'Save 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.)

A screenshot of Sentry's 'Edit Alert Rule' panel with an arrow pointing at 'WebHooks' in 'Send a notification via'

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.

Once that’s all configured, you’ll start seeing Sentry events on your Hosted Graphite dashboards automatically.


Heather Wiencko

Software Engineering Manager at Hosted Graphite.

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