Isn’t the “solution” for Sentry that deploying it is such a pain in the ass that no one bothers to really do this? I haven’t checked in years but that always seemed like the real competitive blocker?

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mechsy 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you need less scale/features go for glitchtip. If you’re not going for k8s, the self-hosted docker-compose version of sentry works fine including proper releases and support by the sentry team etc. Just experimental newly introduced features can be a bit wonky. They are doing much more than just throwing code over the fence. Also phone home telemetry is optional and there’s a switch for just errors mode. IMHO this really builds trust. With regards to deployment complexity: well it’s built for handling high volumes of events. I’d reckon this is more a consequence of scaling the project rather than a coordinated plan to push people to their cloud offering. If you do go for k8s or choose to deploy the stack yourself, you even get access to the full scale solution. But if you’re at that scale, you probably have someone hanging around who knows how to run your clickhouse setup. You still get the full sentry software and SDKs for free in that case. I think this is as fair as it gets with regards to the open source SaaS model.

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homebrewer 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This may very well be caused by my incompetence, but Sentry's docker-compose setup has never survived for more than a few months under my control. Something always destroys itself without an obvious reason sooner or later, and either refuses to start, or starts and doesn't really work. I tried updating it regularly, tried never updating it, getting the same treatment either way.

	▲	16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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bberenberg 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I did not intend to be critical of their work. They're doing OSS as best as they can and good for them. I am just saying that it's a different beast if Sentry is OSS vs a much simpler to operate OSS product. Licensing matters less when the operational cost acts as an inhibitor to adoption of your OSS offering.

	▲	mechsy 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		True, opportunity cost is a factor, sorry if my reply sounded a bit brash. IMHO they are one of the few orgs who got this model right compared to lots of others who went the open core or support/consulting contract required OSS route.

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vanschelven 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Earlier discussion on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43725815

I'm personally on the fence how much of it is intentional... from the_mitsuhiko's side it probably isn't, but "the purpose of a system is what it does" and all.

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veeti 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Don't believe the salesmen, self hosting Sentry has been the most liberating feeling in a long while. Buy a cheap dedicated server with 64 gigs of RAM from Hetzner, run their install script and it's literally up and running. I'm processing volumes that would bankrupt me on their managed service without breaking a sweat.

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Nextgrid 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agreed. It was easier for me to rebuild parts of it for my own use than to self-host it. At my scale, a single DB works well as a datastore instead of Clickhouse/etc.

But then again I think this only prevents small players from "competing" by self-hosting, so the revenue loss there would be minimal either way. Large enterprises are too incompetent to even self-host a single self-contained binary, so for those the availability of source code and ease of hosting would make no difference, they would still use the SaaS.

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the_mitsuhiko 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Isn’t the “solution” for Sentry that deploying it is such a pain in the ass that no one bothers to really do this?

That Sentry is a pain to deploy is not really intentional, it just happened over the years. However because it's a pain to deploy it also opens up a market for people that create managed deployments so I would say, that if anything, it made it worse. For self deployed Sentry you do not need to pay cent, the license explicitly allows it.