Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

How Etsy gets its mobile apps ready for peak traffic

Most advice about surviving a traffic spike is about capacity. Scale the fleet, warm the caches, load test the checkout path. All of it assumes you can fix whatever breaks the moment you find it. Mobile apps don’t work that way. I spent an hour on a workshop with Jay Henry, a senior engineering manager at Etsy who owns engineering strategy across three teams covering CI, build, test, release, observe, and SRE. Jay’s take: a web team having a bad day can revert in minutes.

Debugging a checkout latency spike with Sentry metrics

Checkout suddenly got a lot slower for a chunk of users, and the only clue was a spike in an application metric. In this walkthrough, we go from that spike to a linked trace that shows exactly where the time went. Using Codex alongside Sentry, we dig into the trace data, isolate the slowdown to the European backend, and follow it down to a single Stripe request that's dragging everyone down with it. Along the way, we talk through what actually helps here: caching, timeouts, async calls, and other ways to keep one slow dependency from becoming everyone's problem.

Big improvements to Seer Agent

Today marks exactly five months since we launched Seer Agent, our friendly AI agent for querying all things in your Sentry projects (well, five months and a day ago, but close enough). Since then, we’ve had a lot of chats with Seer Agent. You may have even seen a few of them popping up on social media recently. It’s become an integral part of our debugging workflows and feature iteration process.

Protecting releases, fixing bugs with Sentry & LaunchDarkly

As fast as AI can generate code, getting that code to production still tends to slow things down. It makes sense. When code breaks in production it’s not just a nuisance; it’s a full-blown incident. And can have big impacts for your company and customers. The question really is, can you catch broken code as quickly as you can ship it? In this livestream, Peter McCarron, Technical Product Marketing at Sentry, is joined by Tom Totenberg, Head of Release Automation at LaunchDarkly, to talk about how you can automatically protect new releases from code merge to error detection.

Building Sentry's Laravel AI Integration

During a recent Agent Hackweek, an internal Sentry event that gives us a week to build any AI or agent project we want, a colleague pitched me on writing the Laravel AI integration. The goal was to give agents built with Laravel AI the same Agent Tracing support we already have for other frameworks. I liked the idea, he built Sentry’s Agent Tracing for Python based agents before which meant he already had domain knowledge.

Debugging our AI search assistant with agent tracing

In order for users to get the most out of the data being sent to Sentry, it’s important that we make it easy to find that data. Our team works on features to help users browse their data to find a particular event using search queries and filters. The search bar enables users to find their data by specifying search terms. Searching uses the Sentry Search Syntax, which can be barrier for users.

Application Metrics caught my broken size estimator

There’s a very specific kind of frustration that comes from waiting several minutes for a video to encode, dragging it into a message, and getting hit with a “file too large” error. Then you’re blindly trying to shave off a few more megabytes by re-encoding, maybe at a lower resolution or a smaller bitrate, hoping you won’t have to do it more than one or two more times. Here’s how I used Sentry’s Application Metrics to make a more accurate video size estimator.