Sentry or an alternative?

Sentry is the market leader with the largest ecosystem and works well from free-tier to enterprise. Rollbar and Bugsnag are strong alternatives with slightly different UX opinions. GlitchTip is a self-hosted Sentry-compatible open-source option. For most teams, Sentry's SaaS is the pragmatic pick.

Should we send PII to the error tracker?

Minimize it. Scrub obvious PII (emails, SSNs, credit cards) in the SDK before sending. User IDs are fine and useful for grouping. Full request bodies and cookies are usually not — they leak session tokens and PII that end up in a third-party system, which is a privacy and compliance issue.

How do we budget for error-tracking cost?

Sentry-class tools price on event volume. Typical spend: $50-500/month for early startups, $1-5K/month for mid-stage, $10-50K/month at scale. Aggressive noise filtering can cut spend 50-70%. Regular quota reviews prevent runaway bills after a bad release generates a million errors overnight.

Error Tracking: Sentry, Rollbar, and How to Actually Triage

Error tracking captures, groups, and surfaces application errors from production with enough context to reproduce and fix.

Error Tracking: The System That Turns User Frustration Into Actionable Tickets

Error tracking is the discipline of capturing every exception thrown in production — client-side and server-side — deduplicating them, enriching them with context (user, session, environment, breadcrumbs), and surfacing them to engineers with enough detail to reproduce and fix. Tools like Sentry, Rollbar, Bugsnag, and Datadog Error Tracking dominate the space. Without an error tracker, you learn about production bugs the hard way: from angry support tickets, days after they happened, without a stack trace.

Why error tracking is separate from logs

General log platforms (Datadog, Loki, CloudWatch) are optimized for time-series text search; error trackers are optimized for the specific workflow around exceptions: automatic stack-trace deduplication, source-map resolution for minified JavaScript, release-based regression detection, assign-to-engineer workflows, and per-error notification routing. You can technically use logs for errors, and small teams do — but past a few dozen errors per day, the workflow gap between 'grep logs for exceptions' and a purpose-built tracker is enormous. Most mature teams run both.

Grouping and deduplication

The most-loved feature of a good error tracker is grouping: 100,000 instances of the same TypeError become one issue with a count and a graph, not 100,000 items to triage. Grouping algorithms use stack trace fingerprints; when they group too aggressively (unrelated errors merged) or too loosely (same error split across variants), tune the fingerprinting rules explicitly. A good grouping day means 20 issues across 10K events; a bad grouping day means 500 issues across 10K events, which is functionally impossible to triage.

Source maps and release tracking

Client-side JavaScript is minified in production, producing stack traces like a.min.js:1:5432 that are useless. Source maps map minified locations back to original file/line. Every production deploy must upload source maps to the error tracker as part of the build pipeline; missing source maps is the #1 reason teams report 'Sentry isn't useful.' Release tracking (tag every error with the deploy that produced it) unlocks regression detection — 'this error started in release v2.14.7' points directly at the PR to revert.

Sampling and noise reduction

High-volume errors (a browser extension throwing on every page load, a bot triggering the same 404) can generate millions of events and eat your error-tracking budget without producing new information. Rules to apply: filter known-noise error types at the SDK layer before they're sent; sample repeat-offender errors after N occurrences per hour; ignore errors from unsupported browsers if you've decided not to support them. Aggressive filtering feels wrong — 'aren't we hiding real bugs?' — but the alternative is a tracker so noisy nobody looks at it, which is functionally the same as having no tracker.

Triage workflow

Errors that aren't triaged pile up and become noise. Weekly rhythm: on-call engineer reviews new-issue queue, categorizes as (a) ship-a-fix-now, (b) file-a-ticket, (c) resolve-as-wont-fix, (d) merge-with-existing. Unresolved issues older than 90 days get auto-resolved and require a new occurrence to reappear. Every P0/P1 error routes to the on-call channel immediately; P2+ batches into daily digests. Without a defined triage workflow, error trackers become write-only data lakes.

Frequently asked questions

Sentry or an alternative?: Sentry is the market leader with the largest ecosystem and works well from free-tier to enterprise. Rollbar and Bugsnag are strong alternatives with slightly different UX opinions. GlitchTip is a self-hosted Sentry-compatible open-source option. For most teams, Sentry's SaaS is the pragmatic pick.
Should we send PII to the error tracker?: Minimize it. Scrub obvious PII (emails, SSNs, credit cards) in the SDK before sending. User IDs are fine and useful for grouping. Full request bodies and cookies are usually not — they leak session tokens and PII that end up in a third-party system, which is a privacy and compliance issue.
How do we budget for error-tracking cost?: Sentry-class tools price on event volume. Typical spend: $50-500/month for early startups, $1-5K/month for mid-stage, $10-50K/month at scale. Aggressive noise filtering can cut spend 50-70%. Regular quota reviews prevent runaway bills after a bad release generates a million errors overnight.