Sentry
Ranked 4 of 16 observability platforms by recommenders
Error monitoring service that alerts on new issues with commit context; people like it for the self-hosted option and integrations. Self-hosting is hard to install and maintain.
Error monitoring service that alerts on new issues with commit context; people like it for the self-hosted option and integrations. Self-hosting is hard to install and maintain.
61 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 31
- criticize it
- 30
- approval share
- 51%
Recommended in 11 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 31 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1 recommender for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 11 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Alerts on new issues with useful context
“Sentry is great at alerting me to new issues and it also has other features like JS session replays that are nice.”
Comment from 24 Jul 2026 in “Ask HN: What are your current favorite monitoring and observability solutions?” “I've found it very useful when those errors include context about which commit introduced the issue”
Comment from 13 Aug 2026 in “Build Wide, Ship Narrow” Self-hosted version works well and is supported
“the self-hosted docker-compose version of sentry works fine including proper releases and support by the sentry team”
Comment from 16 Dec 2025 in “O'saasy License Agreement” “self hosting Sentry has been the most liberating feeling in a long while”
Comment from 16 Dec 2025 in “O'saasy License Agreement” “We have 10s of thousands of customers that run Sentry self-hosted.”
Comment from 16 Dec 2025 in “O'saasy License Agreement” - Comment from 7 Feb 2026 in “France's homegrown open source online office suite”
Integrates with other tools and MCP
“having Claude hitting the Sentry APIs directly and getting the info it needs, whether async or not”
Comment from 18 Feb 2026 in “Launch HN: Sonarly (YC W26) – AI agent to triage and fix your production alerts” “There are decent MCP integrations with sentry and other tools that can be useful for validation”
Comment from 24 Jan 2026 in “Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms” “It reads the Sentry MCP, compare the errors to the app source code”
Comment from 4 Sep 2026 in “Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production?” - Comment from 26 Mar 2026 in “Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people”
- Comment from 23 Jun 2026 in “In Praise of Memcached”
- Comment from 11 Jan 2026 in “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (January 2026)”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Hard to install and maintain
“It was easier for me to rebuild parts of it for my own use than to self-host it.”
Comment from 16 Dec 2025 in “O'saasy License Agreement” “deploying it is such a pain in the ass that no one bothers to really do this”
Comment from 16 Dec 2025 in “O'saasy License Agreement” “self-hosted Sentry, which is notoriously hard to install and maintain”
Comment from 9 Nov 2025 on Hacker News Collects user data, privacy concerns
“I wish Sentry would have separate infra for "operating on data collected by Sentry" and "submit every mouse click to Sentry"”
Comment from 5 Feb 2026 in “When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown” “You use other proprietary services that spy on your customers, like Sentry and Firebase, because privacy costs money.”
Comment from 29 Jan 2026 in “Making niche solutions is the point” “I don't want to send customer conversations and agent thoughts to a giant multi-tenant borg SaaS database”
Comment from 5 Aug 2026 in “DuckDB – Data power tools for your laptop, now in Clojure (2023)” - Comment from 28 Aug 2026 in ““It works better in the app””
- Comment from 4 Apr 2026 in “Is MCP Dead? What We Learned on MCP, CLI, and Skills”
Other observability platforms people recommend
The four most recommended other observability platforms, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grafana | 71 | 41 | 63% | 11 | — | — |
| Prometheus | 48 | 24 | 67% | 11 | — | Approved |
| Datadog | 40 | 39 | 51% | 11 | — | — |
| SentryThis page | 31 | 30 | 51% | 11 | — | — |
| SigNoz | 19 | 2 | 90% | 9 | — | Approved |
What people said
40 of the 67 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Many very public services (eg. github.com, sentry.io, office365.com, archive.org) outright don't support it.”
“It reads the Sentry MCP, compare the errors to the app source code”
“So many apps are just a WebView vessel for Crashlytics and Sentry and Dog knows how much more tracking.”
“if you want to mix Sentry, Langfuse, Datadog, etc, OTel is still probably the best option”
“I've found it very useful when those errors include context about which commit introduced the issue”
“I don't want to send customer conversations and agent thoughts to a giant multi-tenant borg SaaS database”
“That's the kind of discipline we need more of.”
“Sentry is great at alerting me to new issues and it also has other features like JS session replays that are nice.”
“sentry integrates well with redis in python”
“not being compatible with Sentry's agent is a missed opportunity”
“the Sentry account was effectively locked to a project that you cannot transfer”
“It can be inadvertently, especially with Sentry.”
“DEFAULT Sentry telemetry exfiltrates 100% of full AI prompts/responses”
“sensible stuff anyone using these tools would want, it all works pretty well”
“it accurately identified an issue I've been working on this week”
“leaving seamless Sentry, Depot, Linear, editor plugins”
“you can use Sentry to do so initially”
“the real win from Sentry's approach is not the format — it is the semantic restructuring”
“having Claude hitting the Sentry APIs directly and getting the info it needs, whether async or not”
“found it performant and pretty easy to keep running and updated”
“try to connect to sentry.io on startup”
“I wish Sentry would have separate infra for "operating on data collected by Sentry" and "submit every mouse click to Sentry"”
“the NAS's web interface using sentry for logging/monitoring, and part of what was logged were internal hostnames”
“You use other proprietary services that spy on your customers, like Sentry and Firebase, because privacy costs money.”
“There are decent MCP integrations with sentry and other tools that can be useful for validation”
“It's not as demanding as a some of the other software out there, like a self-hosted Sentry install”
“has a different but overlapping feature-set as DataDog and has a free tier”
“You connect GitHub, CI, Sentry, and Linear”
“We have 10s of thousands of customers that run Sentry self-hosted.”
“self hosting Sentry has been the most liberating feeling in a long while”
“Sentry is quite successful.”
“Something always destroys itself without an obvious reason sooner or later, and either refuses to start, or starts and doesn't really work.”
“the self-hosted docker-compose version of sentry works fine including proper releases and support by the sentry team”
“It was easier for me to rebuild parts of it for my own use than to self-host it.”
“deploying it is such a pain in the ass that no one bothers to really do this”
“paying a proven solution to professionals who really understand that problem domain”
“In fact, in general I'm a happy customer of theirs.”
“Pay sentry sign data processor contract”
“we still prioritize the long tail”
“self-hosted Sentry, which is notoriously hard to install and maintain”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.