Prometheus vs Sentry

What Prometheus is

Prometheus scrapes metrics from your services and stores them as time series, with its own query language for alerting and dashboards.

What Sentry is

Sentry provides real-time error tracking and performance monitoring for your software. It notifies you exactly which line of code failed and what the user was doing at the time. Beyond bugs, it analyzes slow page loads and DB queries. Its 'Session Replay' lets you watch a video of what the user saw during the error, allowing you to solve issues in seconds.

What Sentry is built to do

Error Monitoring

View software crashes and errors in real-time, down to the specific line of code.

Session Replay

Visually watch the user's session to understand exactly how an error occurred.

Performance

Automatically detect slow API requests and sluggish page transitions.

Issue Linkage

Assign errors directly to the team via integrations like Jira or GitHub.

Choose Prometheus if

• Teams running services that need metrics and alerting they control.

Choose Sentry if

• Software Developers, DevOps Engineers, and Product Managers.

Prometheus: pros & cons

• The de facto standard for metrics in Kubernetes
• Pull model means no agent pushing to you
• Free and open source
• Long-term storage needs an extra component
• PromQL takes time to learn
• Not built for logs or traces

Sentry: pros & cons

• Unrivaled Detection: Learn about errors before your users even have time to complain.
• Wide Support: Compatible with almost every language from Python to Swift.
• Rich Context: Provides logs, device info, and more to help you fix bugs faster.
• Performance Monitoring: Shows exactly where your application is slowing down.
• Noise Management: Can send thousands of unimportant alerts if not tuned correctly.
• Cost: Data storage costs can rise for applications with very high traffic volume.
• Setup: Properly integrating it into every part of an app takes some dedicated time.