Developer-first Application Monitoring: Our Continued Partnership with Sentry

Software has eaten the world—and it’s still hungry. There are more than 4.5B global internet users and the average adult user spends more than six hours a day on the internet. Digital experiences have become ubiquitous and central to our lives. And yet, they often aren’t great: a large share of internet pages take longer than four seconds to load; commercial software contains anywhere between 5–20 bugs for every 1,000 lines of code. The vast quantity of use combined with the inadequate experience quality are why tools that help builders understand the performance of their applications, monitor real user experiences and quickly debug and solve problems before they impact their end-users are as relevant as ever. This is why we’re thrilled to continue our partnership with Sentry as part of their recent Series E financing.

Ten to twenty years ago, software was developed by few, well-resourced organizations in a rigid and centralized fashion. Each company had to manage their own systems and infrastructure within data centers run by large IT organizations. Simply ensuring that servers were running and routers were communicating was a daunting task in and of itself. Many great companies emerged in infrastructure and network monitoring to help them in this process.

Today, the world is very different, and shifting left. It is estimated that there are ~27M developers, growing rapidly at >20% YoY. The cloud has taken the world by storm. AWS is growing 40% YoY at a $71B run rate, with Azure and GCP following and dev-first cloud providers such as Cloudflare rapidly emerging. Technology-first companies are already overtaking the S&P and Fortune lists and there were more than 550 new unicorns in 2021 alone. The majority of these companies were born in a digital and cloud-native world, with application developer teams central to their organizations and empowered to own and create the best end-to-end experiences for the users of their software.

When we first teamed up with Sentry in 2016 to lead their Series A round, the company was already a crucial tool in the developer movement, solving the most critical need first: tracking errors and providing developers with the context they need to quickly debug and resolve errors in their applications. Runtime errors often consume inordinate amounts of development time and detract from the primary goal of creating and adding features to enhance user experience.

Today, Sentry is essential for 85,000 organizations, enabling them to ship better software faster by providing a holistic understanding of their applications. Sentry has empowered more than 3.5M developers to connect the dots between their frontend and backend code, between errors and performance monitoring, and across native, mobile and web-based platforms. This unique combination is driving explosive and unprecedented organic growth for Sentry. The 2021 Okta Businesses @ Work report named Sentry the fastest growing developer tool of the year. The team has more than doubled in the past two years to nearly 250 employees and will continue to grow at a similar pace this year.

Sentry’s leadership team has skillfully navigated through the company’s remarkable hypergrowth, all while maintaining a keen focus on developer needs. We’re honored to have closely witnessed Sentry’s progress thus far and look forward to continuing our support throughout this next chapter.

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