Sentry adds performance monitoring for React Native, more

Sentry has added support for React Native, Android, Xamarin and Flutter-based apps to its application performance monitoring platform to help developers find and fix bugs.

Application monitoring software provider Sentry has expanded its reach in performance monitoring to cover React Native, Android and Xamarin applications.

Sentry's goal in supporting these environments, along with updating its Flutter SDK, is to reach developers where both they and their customers are. End users are accessing applications from all sorts of devices, from smartphones to tablets to PCs and Chromebooks as well as cars. The ability to monitor performance across all of these different platforms is crucial for developers.

Because there are so many options available to developers, Sentry must be able to support the popular frameworks developers use most.

About one-third of mobile developers use the most popular frameworks, including React Native, Xamarin and Google's Flutter, according to Milin Desai, CEO of San Francisco-based Sentry. Flutter is a software development kit for building natively compiled mobile, web and desktop apps from a single codebase.

The Apple ecosystem has the Swift programming language, Android has Kotlin, "and we're seeing more cross-platform frameworks like Xamarin coming into play," Desai said. "Facebook introduced React Native, which takes JavaScript and makes it work for mobile-specific devices. Google's gaining traction with Flutter and then you have these cross-platform frameworks. Long story short is there are all of these different frameworks, and different teams in different organizations choose different paths."

Sentry operates in the subsector of mobile app error checking and application performance monitoring (APM). Other players in this industry include Bugsnag, Airbrake (recently acquired by LogicMonitor), Google's Firebase Crashlytics and Instabug. Dynatrace also has mobile APM capabilities.

Charlotte DunlapCharlotte Dunlap

"As part of enterprise efforts to automate IT to reduce risk and lower costs, DevOps teams are increasingly interested in observability technologies," said Charlotte Dunlap, an analyst at GlobalData in Santa Cruz, Calif. "These efforts will accelerate the move to app modernization and digitization. Later this year, we'll see a big push in this direction among cloud and platform providers as part of their automation solutions."

Yet whatever platform a developer is building an application for, there is still a need for tools to help them identify dependencies that can impact the app's performance across platforms.

Sentry's performance monitoring for React Native, Android and Xamarin helps development teams  accelerate the identification of performance issues by tracing them to poor-performing API calls along with related errors, Desai said. Sentry also provides developers with insight into trends in their software that can enable them to prevent future performance issues.

Long story short is there are all of these different frameworks, and different teams in different organizations choose different paths.
Milin DesaiCEO, Sentry

Sentry for Flutter

The company built its Sentry for Flutter tool in partnership with Google to help developers capture errors across Kotlin, Java for Android, Swift, Objective-C for iOS, and C/C++. Sentry will capture any exception from Flutter. The Sentry coverage for Flutter means developers can fix issues once and have the solution work everywhere -- from Android to iOS and the other supported platforms. Other new capabilities include offline caching and fatal crash support, which ensures error reports are sent even if a user's device goes offline or a fatal crash occurs, Desai said.

When an error occurs, the Sentry system will notify development teams using Slack, Pager Duty, email or their notification system of choice. The notification would include how many users have been affected, what devices and browsers are affected and all the metadata about the issue. In addition, the notification is broken down to the point of identifying the exact line of code and the potential code comment where that issue could have come from.

More than 68,000 organizations worldwide use Sentry's products to monitor the performance of their code, including Atlassian, CloudFlare, Disney, GitHub and Microsoft, Desai said.

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