12 Days of Partners, Integrations, and Other Good Stuff: Sentry

It’s that time of year again. Snow has begun falling from the skies in places that are lucky enough to have moisture in the air, we’re all already tired of hearing Michael Buble songs playing on a loop, and some of us are getting in the spirit by wearing ugly Christmas sweaters everywhere we go.

To celebrate, Shortcut is highlighting twelve of our favorite integrations and partnerships. We hope you return every day to read these posts alongside your tinglers and fuzzles, your dafflers and wuzzles, and your delicious pot (or Beyond meat) roasts.

Our first featured integration is one that runs its own Twelve Days of Stuff series, which in the past was written in a suspiciously similar writing style to our own, almost as if the same person started this series at both companies: Sentry.  

On the First Day of Partnerships, Integrations, and Other Good Things, Shortcut brings to you: Sentry, to find and diagnose all the problems in your programming tree. Not sure if that works as a melody, so maybe don’t try singing it.

In the olden days, like a few years ago, when some piece of software broke, it was a “fun” and “exciting” puzzle for the team to work out. A bunch of customers complained, support spent two hours trying to recreate the problem until they discovered it only happens on a version of Chrome that those customers should have updated three months ago, and then three developers gathered around a computer to stare at code until the cause of the problem finally hit one of them.

We all still live in those olden days to some degree or another, but ideally software development will one day reach a point where customers never have to act as unpaid QA. Can you imagine if a building’s architect treated the residents as a kind of QA team that could help discover if parts of the building were gonna fall off if they did the wrong thing? You don’t have to imagine it, since that’s essentially what’s happening at the Millenium Tower in San Francisco.

That's where Sentry comes in. Sentry catches bugs in your code as soon as those bugs are in production. Not only that, it can tell you how many people the bug has impacted, the browsers (or phones or systems) those people are encountering the bug in, which release it was part of, which commit was likely responsible for it, and which developer(s) are best suited to tackle it.

Of course, before anyone can tackle anything it needs to be assigned to them so that they're fully aware of the context and can fit it in with the rest of their work. And that's where Shortcut comes in.

Not only can you assign the work to a Shortcut Story from directly within Sentry, you can then update that Story (and Sentry) while fixing the problem thanks to our VCS integrations (which we’ll be writing up as part of this very series.

How does this integration work?

Our integration makes it simple to create Stories from Sentry issues (or add Sentry issues to existing Stories) and to automatically resolve these issues in Sentry by resolving the Story. You either go to Settings > Integrations within Sentry or Settings > Integrations within Shortcut to find the integration and install it. If you're logged in to both accounts (and have Admin rights within both) installation takes about 30 seconds.

Once it's done, to create a Story from a Sentry Issue you'd simply click the Link Shortcut Issue option on the right hand side of the Issue screen in Sentry.

You'll then see a dialog box where you can choose to Create a Story:

This generates a standard Shortcut Story that can then be edited in Shortcut.

Or Link it to an existing one by choosing Link and searching for the Story's title.

Either way, once created or linked, the Story is linked and accessible from within the Sentry Issue and the Sentry Issue is linked from within the Story. You can link one Issue to multiple Stories too, if you’re the kinda person who wants to do that.

Whenever the Shortcut Story is marked as done, it'll automatically mark any associated Sentry Issues as complete so that the fixed problems are no longer shown as pending there.

Use Shortcut + Sentry together to make issue tracking and bug fixing faster than ever before. Less time toggling between tools means more time spent on other things that are more enjoyable than toggling between tools, which is pretty much everything. Except maybe listening to Michael Buble on a loop.