Used For

• +**Your React app breaks on Safari and you have no idea why** → Watch session replays showing exactly which button click caused the crash, with full error context
• +**Performance is slow but you don't know if it's your API or frontend** → Distributed tracing maps the entire request journey, pinpoints the 2-second database query killing your app
• +**Scheduled jobs fail silently at 3am** → Get Slack alerts the moment your cron job dies with stack traces pointing to the exact problem
• +Groups identical errors automatically - instead of 500 'undefined is not a function' alerts, you get one report showing it hit 500 users
• +Session replays with error context - rewind and watch user actions leading up to any crash like a DVR for bugs

Best For

• >Your app crashes in production and you're debugging blind with useless log files
• >Users report bugs you can't reproduce locally no matter how hard you try
• >You're getting roasted in app store reviews for crashes you didn't know existed

Not For

• -Solo developers with simple apps - the 5,000 error limit fills up fast during testing, pushing you to paid plans unnecessarily
• -Teams obsessed with data privacy - it's cloud-first, so your error data lives on Sentry's servers
• -Non-developers who want plug-and-play monitoring - requires adding code snippets to your app and understanding technical concepts

Pairs With

• *Slack (where you get instant notifications when your app crashes, saving the 3am discovery calls)
• *GitHub (automatically links errors to specific commits so you know exactly which deploy broke everything)
• *Vercel or Netlify (deploys trigger new Sentry releases, tracking which version introduced new crashes)
• *DataDog or New Relic (for infrastructure monitoring that Sentry doesn't cover - server health, database performance)
• *Jira (creates tickets automatically from high-impact errors so your team actually fixes recurring issues)
• *PagerDuty (escalates critical errors to on-call engineers when Slack notifications aren't enough)

The Catch

• !The free tier's 5K error limit disappears during development testing - one buggy deploy can blow through your monthly quota in hours
• !Pricing scales with your app's growth, so successful apps with lots of users pay a lot more (usage-based billing can get expensive fast)
• !You'll spend time tuning alert rules or get buried in notification noise - raw error monitoring creates alert fatigue without proper configuration

Bottom Line

Turns 3am panic debugging into 'oh, that line of code broke for 847 users yesterday.'