Uncover Trends with Discover

Discover is a powerful query engine that allows you to query all your error metadata across projects and applications. As you've probably noticed the Sentry SDKs installed in your applications capture huge amounts of events as reflected in the event stream in your Sentry account. Each event is enriched with contextual data about the underlying error, platform, device, user, and more. Also, we highly encourage enriching your error data through the SDK by adding custom tags and configuring the release and environment. For more information see Put your Data to Work.

Let's go over some examples of how to work with all this data to gain some useful insights into the health and stability of your applications.

Discover Through Issues

The Sentry workflow (Alert - Triage - Resolve) notifies you in real-time when your application breaks, then provides all the information and tools to triage and resolve the error. With Discover, users can take a more proactive approach to find the major issues that break their apps. The flow looks something like this:

1. Open Discover and click on Build a new query.

2. From the top-level filter select the projects, environments, and time range of errors you'd like to query.

3. Sentry monitors different types of events for errors, performance, etc. To query issues filter by event.type:error in the search bar.

   

4. Edit the results table columns to show the number of events [count()], unique issues [count_unique(issue)], and impacted users [count_unique(user)] per project.

   

5. At this point, you might want to look for the project with the most issues. Click on the COUNT_UNIQUE(ISSUE) column header to order the line items accordingly.

6. Click on the top project line item and select Add to filter to continue looking into the issues of that specific project.

   

7. Now let's see what those issues are. Change the table columns to display:

   • issue (the issue id)
   • title (issue title)
   • count() (number of events)
   • count_unique(user) (number of unique users impacted by the issue)

8. Per line item/issue you can click on the issue name to open the issue details page and triage it. You can also click on Open Stack to continue querying through the events stack in the context of a specific issue.

   

Discover Through Errors

The true power of Discover lies in its ability to query through all your error metadata, so you're no longer restricted to the context of Issues or Projects and can reveal trends and insights across all your applications. Let's look at some examples.

Errors by URLs

Create a report looking into all the errors occurring in the URL endpoints across your applications.

• Search condition: event.type:error has:url
• Table columns: url, platform.name, count()

• Look into any one of the URL endpoints by clicking on Add to filter and changing the table columns.
• Alternatively, filter URLs patterns using wild cards:

Unhandled Errors

Whether your code is running on a mobile, browser, or server, an unhandled fatal error might crash your application. To find out where those crashes are happening, run the following query in Discover:

• Search condition: event.type:error handled:no level:fatal

• Table columns: mechanism, platform.name, count()

  

To look deeper into one of the crash types:

• Select one of the line item values and add them to the filter

• Modify the table columns to show the crash message and count()

  

Files with Most Errors

To find out which files in your codebase are generating the most errors, run the following query in Discover:

• Search condition: event.type:error has:stack.filename
• Table columns: stack.filename, count()

You can continue exploring a specific filename by adding it to the filter and change the table columns to display the major error culprits in that file:

Errors Per Release

To find out how the health of a specific project is improving (or not) over time as you release new versions, run the following in Discover:

• Search condition: event.type:error
• Table columns: release, count(), count_unique(issue)

Each table cell offers a dynamic context menu that allows you to easily continue exploring your data by automatically updating the search bar or the table columns, according to your selection. Actions like, adding or excluding values from the filter, opening a selected release, or viewing the underlying stack of issues:

Additional Use Cases

As you've probably noticed by now, Discover is extremely useful in gaining visibility and insights into your errors. For additional use cases take a look at the following:

• What issues are consuming my quota?
• Spike Protection was activated — what should I do?
• Discover and Enriching your Error Data