Sentry this week announced it has added support for applications that employ serverless computing frameworks as well as the Google Web Vitals service to its application monitoring tool.
Company CEO Milin Desai said incorporating Google Web Vitals metrics into Sentry Performance Monitoring will become crucial as Google makes good on a pledge to rank websites and applications on its search engine based on the metrics it collects via this service.
Google Web Vitals determines how fast an application is by monitoring how fast a site presents user interface objects. By coupling Web Vitals with transaction data gathered by Sentry, it becomes possible for developers to correlate how a transaction may be adversely impacting the user experience. That data then can be employed to adjust what application programming interfaces (APIs) should be called within an application, Desai said.
At the same time, he noted a larger percentage of developers are starting to employ serverless computing frameworks within the front end of their applications. The Sentry platform now monitors serverless computing frameworks that are employed within a PHP, Node and Ruby-based application. Most of those frameworks are being used to trigger a specific action when some type of event occurs within an application, said Desai.
Finally, Sentry has also added a Trends view that enables developers to see the most improved and most regressed transactions that have occurred over time. That capability enables developers to more easily determine when changes to the overall IT environment are adversely impacting their applications. Armed with that data, it then becomes easier to identify what changes were made at that time.
In general, Desai said there is not enough focus on enabling observability for application developers versus IT operations teams. Sentry Performance Monitoring is designed to enable developers to correlate specific events occurring within their code to actual end user experiences by adding five lines of code to their applications.
Observability tools for developers will not obviate the need for observability tools for IT operations teams, but Desai noted as far as visibility into applications is concerned, most developers today are flying blind. Observability is supposed to be a core tenet of any DevOps practice. However, the level of observability actually being achieved tends to vary widely among IT organizations.
Of course, the best place to solve any issue is going to be within the application code, whenever possible. Many developers could eliminate performance issues long before many IT operations teams realize they exist if they had more visibility into how code was executing. That issue will become all the more pressing as IT organizations deploy applications based on microservices that have many dependencies.
The challenge IT organizations face now is determining not only which observability platforms to employ, but also what level of visibility is required for all the different roles and personas that make up that team.
