Distributed tracing is a powerful technique that allows you to track the flow and timing of requests as they navigate through a system. By linking operations and requests between multiple services, distributed tracing provides valuable insights into system performance and helps identify bottlenecks. In this blog post, we will delve into the benefits of distributed tracing, explore its relevance for various application architectures, and uncover how it operates behind the scenes.

Imagine you start a new hobby — let’s say bike riding. You don’t want to invest a lot in a bike because you’re not sure that you’ll like it. Luckily, you snag a free bike from a friend — it’s clunky, but the price is right. You start out with short rides around your neighborhood and eventually find yourself riding every day, going on longer and longer rides. Your free, heavy bike is holding you back.

Get ready for another round of new releases that will help take your performance and error troubleshooting to the next level. Over the past month of June, we’ve launched a variety of new features that give you more flexibility in managing code coverage, help get to root cause faster, and streamline your everyday usage of Sentry. Here’s the list.

Mobile device users care about three things when it comes to good app performance: We’re going to look at how modern concurrency APIs can help with some of these. We recently shipped a new profiling feature to help you find the sources of main thread contention; specifically detecting issues with image and JSON decoding or regex matching. These point you to spots where you can immediately make improvements to your app’s UI performance.

Few areas of development have seen as much recent change as mobile. Mobile phone and app usage spiked during the pandemic as we adapted to life with social distancing procedures. And even post-Covid, many mobile habits have stuck, whether it’s using apps for connecting with friends, shopping, getting healthcare, or staying fit. In the first half of 2022, daily time spent on mobile devices in the US was up 39% from three years ago and up 9% from late 2021.

Software does not expire, but it “rots”. Its quality degrades over time. As you build your project and add features, you probably won’t always build it in a clean, orderly and mindful way. Especially if you have a tight deadline. So aside from features, you also produce bugs, code smells, and technical debt. That “rots” your software, but your job as a software engineer is to maintain its “freshness” while building on top of it.

Last year we introduced Sentry Cron Monitoring (beta) to help developers get code-level context and performance trends for their scheduled jobs. While Crons remains in beta, we’ve heard your feedback over the past few months and want to share some big improvements we’ve shipped. In this post, we’ll cover how we’ve simplified the setup process by integrating Crons into our SDKs and automating monitor setup for select frameworks.

The month of May has just ended and pretty much everybody agrees that 2023 is absolutely flying by. Here at Sentry, we’re looking to match the speed of 2023 with our own velocity of new product releases. Here they are in a nutshell.

We’re happy to announce that the Sentry SvelteKit SDK is now generally available and ready to help you monitor your SvelteKit application. Last year, we entered the Svelte ecosystem by creating an SDK for Svelte, which provides support for Svelte single page apps. We knew that SvelteKit was already quite far along back then and we kept a close eye on its development. We also received a lot of requests from the community to support SvelteKit.

How frustrating is it when you’ve just landed on a web page, you click on a certain element and an ad or something else pops up and you end up clicking that thing instead? That’s a layout shift, which is bad for the user’s experience and the later they happen, the worse it is. Research from HTTP Archive shows that over 80% of websites use web fonts. Web fonts also cause layout shifts, if they’re not being loaded strategically.