We all know that Prometheus is a popular system for collecting and querying metrics, especially in the cloud native world of Kubernetes and ephemeral instances. But people forget that Java has been running enterprise software since 1995, while Prometheus is a relative newcomer to the scene. It was only created in 2012! Even though Java has had its own metric collectors since before Prometheus was born, none of our new environments speak its (metric) language. How can you bridge that gap?

Zac Propersi, Engineering Manager at Sentry, can tell when a page is not loading as fast as it should — just by looking at it. While working on our new Metric Alerts feature, Zac noticed that the alerts pages were rendering slowly. Being the super Sentry user that he is, he wrote a custom query in Discover to see just how slow the transactions were.

Errors are undesirable for users and you should do everything in your control to keep users away from them. However, they are of utmost importance for developers. They allow developers to understand the inaccuracies and vulnerabilities in their code by alerting them when their code breaks. They also provide relevant information about what went wrong, where, and what can be done to make amends.