Three signals, one solution
While Sentry and traditional logging tools may seem similar—they both capture information about what's happening in an application—their goals and design philosophies are quite different.
Traditional logging captures everything from apps, infrastructure, and networks. This is great for ops and compliance, but for developers, it means a flood of noisy, low-value logs that slow down debugging.
Sentry finds and fixes bugs fast. Unlike traditional logging, Sentry does the heavy lifting: it intelligently groups errors, traces every performance detail, and brings the most critical issues to the forefront—so you can skip the log fatigue.
By focusing on debugging and remediation—not just observability—Sentry helps developers move from "What's broken?" to "Here's how to fix it."
Sentry is designed to work across any kind of application: server-side (backend), mobile and desktop apps, and web-based (frontend) clients. The broad support makes it a powerful and integrated tool also for teams maintaining complex, multi-platform systems.
Sentry provides multiple core capabilities that work together to help you debug faster:
Logging = everything, everywhere.
Sentry takes a different tack. Instead of shoving every byte into one endless log stream, we break telemetry into three independent signals—each purpose-built, each searchable in one place. Here's when to leverage each and how the Sentry API might look:
captureException(err)*Sentry SDKs instrument these out of the box| What you want to know | Use |
|---|---|
| Did this handler run, and with which user ID? | Logs |
| Why is signup 3x slower today? | Spans (timing) + Logs (context) |
| Show the stack trace for this crash and track it as an Issue. | Errors |
| Group and dedupe similar crashes automatically. | Errors |
| Page me if 404s spike above 5 per minute. | Logs (Monitor) |
| Fire an Issue if more than 10 errors in 5 min. | Errors (alert rule) |
| How many SQL queries did this request make? | Spans |
| Correlate a payment exception to the user's activity logs. | Errors + Logs |
Only Errors are grouped into Issues, because they include stack traces, making them easy to track and resolve as a team. Use Sentry's Alerts and workflow automation to expand this.
Logs and Spans are lightweight and cost-effective—they don't trigger Issues, but you can set up Metric Alerts (some other tools call these Monitors) to notify you when something unusual happens. Discover our structured, searchable approach to Sentry Logs.
Let's see how the three signals work together in a real debugging scenario. Below we'll walk through how an issue caused by a slow database query can impact our e-commerce checkout flow. Together, these signals give you the complete picture: what broke, where it was slow, and the context around the failure.