Application performance monitoring company Sentry Inc. today announced the open beta release of its new logging capabilities, adding native support for structured logs directly within the company’s platform for JavaScript and Python applications.

The company says the feature brings logs into the same workflow as error and performance monitoring, offering developers a more unified debugging experience with a richer context.

The release seeks to address an issue where developers using Sentry have access to stack traces, error details and distributed traces, but application logs have remained outside the platform. Logs can now be automatically associated with related issues and traces, making it easier to understand the full sequence of events leading up to and following an incident. The result is faster root cause analysis and reduced context switching between tools.

The new functionality is not designed to compete with generic log aggregators but instead focuses on tightly integrating logs into its core error and performance tracking workflows. Logs are structured and searchable using real application metadata such as customer_id, payment_id and trace_id, allowing developers to isolate specific failures, such as a timeout on a Stripe transaction, without having to grep through external log systems.

With the release, developers can enable logging in Sentry’s JavaScript software development kit (version 9.17.0+) and Python SDK (version 2.27.0+) by initializing the SDK with an experimental flag. Once enabled and working, logs can be sent via dedicated logging application programming interfaces, with support for popular libraries like Winston and Python’s built-in logging also available.

Logs appear alongside errors and traces, and developers can see them aligned with specific spans for clearer performance insights, even when no errors are raised.

Looking forward, Sentry is also planning additional capabilities ahead of a general availability release of the new logging capabilities. Plans include log-based alerts, visual dashboards for trend analysis, live log tailing and support for additional SDKs, including Go, PHP and Ruby.

The feature is now available for users on Sentry’s developer, team and business plans.

Sentry is a venture capital-backed company that has raised $217 million over six rounds, including a round of $90 million on a $3 billion valuation in May 2022. Investors in the company include Bond Capital Management LP, Accel Partners LP, New Enterprise Associates Inc. and K5 Global.

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