Sentry alternative: Bugsink to the rescue

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Error tracking is an essential monitoring tool if you develop software.

Sentry is basically the only tool for that, but it comes at a heavy cost: resource usage. A default install of Sentry already needs at least 14GB of RAM. Basically you have to provide 24-32GB for even the smallest instance and If you ever had to host it yourself you probably know the setup and maintenance is a PITA.

I’m not a fan of bloated software stacks, so I really disliked running Sentry in my lab except for playing around with it.

I was looking for an alternative for quite some time and finally found it: Bugsink.

The setup takes less than five minutes. While Bugsink is still in active development, it already provides all the features needed for solo developers or small teams. Best of all, it runs with less than 700MB of RAM.

And a big plus: it’s compatible with the Sentry SDK, so you don’t need to change your codebase. Just import the Sentry SDK, set the DSN and voila get a full stack trace:

Setup

It’s best to follow https://www.bugsink.com/docs/installation/ to get Bugsink up and running, e.g.

docker run \
  -e SECRET_KEY=yjxwpAYisCXl3L5x3QBMjCwMVCiePVsYLDldTcC9YkBDFnce8N \
  -e CREATE_SUPERUSER=admin:admin \
  -e PORT=8000 \
  -p 8000:8000 \
  bugsink/bugsink

Visit http://localhost:8000/ the default username and password are admin unless changed via CREATE_SUPERUSER.

Write down the SECRET_KEY (It's randomly generated on each page load)

Project Configuration

Create a new project in Bugsink and install the Sentry SDK to configure the DSN.

For example with WordPress you can just install the Sentry Plugin and set the DSN in wp-config.php like this:

define( 'WP_SENTRY_PHP_DSN', 'https://4a50bd878dc90929fe9454e835c2bdfb@bugsink.herold.me/1' );