What makes JavaScript great is also what makes it frustrating to debug. Its asynchronous nature makes it easy to manipulate the DOM in response to user events, but it also makes it difficult to locate problems. And JavaScript’s ubiquity has resulted in a variety of runtimes (e.g. Chromium’s V8, Safari’s JavaScriptCore, and Firefox’s SpiderMonkey) but having so many platforms can cause dizzying idiosyncracies — all of which need to be supported equally.

Jamstack (Javascript + APIs + Markup) is a web architecture that combines the convenience of pre-built websites with the capacity to handle custom APIs and serverless functions. By separating the frontend UI from backend databases, Jamstack allows developers to structure their application in ways that deliver dynamic content faster.

Like a bratty teenager, traditional monitoring answers your questions, but does so in a terse, unhelpful manner: Why is my page slow? Guess it’s the API call. It’s a 504 thing — you wouldn’t understand. Ok, so why is the API call slow? Ask your DB query. Gosh! You need a better conversation with your code — one which gives you contextual clues about your application’s performance.

As you could probably tell from the title, we shipped an SDK for Next.js. This means you can capture errors, measure performance, manage releases, configure suspect commits, and automatically upload sourcemaps to view unminified JavaScript and TypeScript with zero(-ish) configuration. Why was Next.js next on our list? Well, it’s one of the fastest-growing React frameworks and developers love it.

A couple of weeks back, we broke sign-ups. And in the most meta fashion, we learned about this because someone here had the foresight to set up an alert in Sentry to notify us if sign-ups dropped to zero. Getting alerted kicked off our incident response process. A team was formed to tackle “What broke?”, “How do we fix this?”, “How long has this been happening?”, “Are any other services impacted?”, and much more.