Sentry Integration Platform: Optimizing Incident Management with Amixr

Earlier this year, we launched the Sentry Integration Platform — a new way for developers to build workflows on top of Sentry. You can read all about it in our launch post. Interested in creating an integration? Check out our documentation.

It’s hard (if not impossible) to imagine production infrastructure without incidents. And service reliability can be highly dependent on how quickly and efficiently engineers are able to tackle these incidents. Reliability engineers are often faced with four questions:

• Who will be notified in case of an incident?
• How to guarantee response time and perform SLA?
• How to avoid noise and keep the team focused?
• How to be sure incident totals are under control during service growth?

Sometimes the answers to these questions are surprising.

Incident Management… in Slack?

Alert Mixer (Amixr) is an incident management platform with deep Slack integration (and is, as the title so clearly states, a part of the Sentry Integration Platform).

In Amixr, incident workflow is organized collaboratively with the goal of achieving significant improvement in performance, while helping to answer the questions above. Amixr aims to make it significantly faster to chat, react, ask, involve, make decisions, and write postmortems.

Their platform performs:

• Customizable Routing
• Escalations (Bob missed incident, Alex will be notified)
• On-Call Scheduling
• Knowledge Base
• Incident Grouping to avoid noise
• Multi-Channel Delivery (Slack, Mobile Phone, SMS, Telegram…)
• Reporting
• AI Performance analysis
• and more, and more…

In other words, a long list of useful things meant to make incident response less painful, more collaborative, and faster.

Amixr + Sentry Integration Platform

In Amixr, issues from Sentry get stored alongside alerts from other sources.

Most of the time, a Sentry alert is from an app-level bug or exception. The issue cannot be resolved without manual intervention from a software engineer.

Sentry’s Integration Platform helps Amixr synchronize Issue statuses in Sentry with Incident statuses in Amixr.

In Amixr, Incidents have statuses, including:

• New
• Acknowledged (means engineer started working on a problem)
• Resolved (means it was resolved)

In Sentry Issues can be:

• New
• Ignored
• Resolved

Status prioritization is great, but communication between platforms is even better. Here’s a look at our two-way status synchronization. Each incident status change in Amixr immediately updates those in Sentry and vice-versa:

If you’ve read this far, it’s safe to assume you’re at least mildly interested in either the Amixr integration or building your own Sentry integration. Install Amixr, or learn more about Sentry’s Integration Platform.