Sentry alerts — what to do when one fires
On-call playbook for triaging, silencing, and resolving Sentry error alerts.
Sentry watches for unhandled errors in production and alerts the on-call engineer when something is wrong. The full ops playbook lives at docs/SENTRY-OPERATIONS.md — this article is a quick orientation.
When an alert fires
Triage steps
- 1Open the alert link in Slack — it goes straight to the Sentry issue.
- 2Read the title and the most recent stack trace. Identify the user-impacting symptom (booking failed, email did not send, page crashed, etc.).
- 3Check the issue page for a Session Replay video if one exists — they are recorded for 100% of error sessions and show exactly what the user did.
- 4Decide: drop everything (P0 — payments / auth / data loss), schedule for today (P1 — broken feature affecting a real user), or backlog (P2 — noise or rare path).
- 5Update the issue status in Sentry — Resolved, Ignored, or assigned to a teammate.
Useful Sentry features
- Session Replay — 1% of normal sessions + 100% of error sessions, with PII masked
- User feedback widget — students can report what they were trying to do
- Tunnel route at /monitoring — bypasses ad blockers so error reports actually reach Sentry
- Source maps — every release uploads sourcemaps so stack traces show real file/line numbers
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Important: Do NOT ignore an alert without reading it. The thresholds are tuned to fire only on real, actionable issues. Repeated ignores create alert blindness.
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Tip: If an error is genuinely noise (a known third-party flake, a bot scanning, etc.), use Sentry's Ignore option with a reason rather than just resolving — that way it stops paging but you keep the audit trail.
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Note: See docs/SENTRY-OPERATIONS.md for the full SOP — alert routing, on-call rotation, runbooks per error class, and the monthly noise-pruning ritual.
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