Discovery: Upgrade front end Sentry client

[cvalarida]

User Story

As a VSP front end engineer, I need to know the risks, benefits, and effort involved in upgrading the front end Sentry client.

Currently, we're using Raven which is depreciated in favor of the new unified client.

Assumptions

• The bundle size for the unified client is larger than Raven.js
• Changing all the references to Raven will be pretty straightforward
• The latest version of the unified client will work with our current version of Sentry
• We'll continue to update Sentry to take advantage of new features
• The Raven client will eventually be incompatible with the version of Sentry we're on
• The unified client gives developers access to useful new features that we can use in our current version of Sentry

Goal

We understand the trade-offs and the level of effort involved with upgrading the Sentry client.

Acceptance Criteria

• [ ] The above assumptions are verified or refuted (when possible) and documented in this ticket
• [ ] If the risk is "small enough", a new ticket is written for actually upgrading

Definition of Done

• [ ] Attached to a Milestone (when will this be completed?)
• [ ] Attached to an Epic (what body of work is this a part of?)
• [x] Labeled with Team (product support, analytics-insights, operations, triage, tools-improvements)
• [x] Labeled with Practice Area (backend, frontend, devops, design, research, product, ia, qa, analytics, call center, research, accessibility, content)
• [x] Labeled with Type (bug, request, discovery, documentation, etc.)

[cvalarida]

• We have raven as a dependency as well as raven-js.
  • The former is for node, the latter is for the browser
  • We're not actually using the node version anywhere that I could find
  • Grepped for import .* from 'raven' and got no results, when import .* from 'raven-js' did
• The latest version of raven-js is 3.27.4, but we're on 3.14.2 in the yarn.lock file
• It looks like the new sentry SDK should work well with Sentry 9.1.1—what we're currently running on premise
  • I don't have a definitive source for this, though
• According to this old comment in the raven-python repo, they don't support old versions of the server, but the protocols don't change much
  • I take this to mean the newest features on the client may not work, but it'll probably be fine most of the time
  • Seems like a lot of speculation, but I wasn't able to find a compatibility table or anything
  • There is this repo, but it didn't seem to shed any light on compatibility
• According the the bundle analyzer, the raven-js dependency in production has:
  • State size: 92.83 KB
  • Parsed size: 26.25 KB
  • Gzipped size: 9.31 KB
• I imported the latest Sentry client and analyzed the bundle after using it
  • The @sentry library in the bundle had the following:
  • Stat size: 47.55 KB
  • Parsed size: 16.89 KB
  • Gzipped size: 4.74 KB
  • Before importing the library, the 1990 1990-edu-benefits.entry.<slug>.js bundle (the only one I built) was 791 KB
  • After importing the library, the bundle was 846.KiB
  • Conclusion: The new Sentry SDK is about the same size as the old raven-js

[cvalarida]

http://sentry.vetsgov-internal/settings/vets-gov/projects/website-production/install/javascript/ points to version 5.1.0, but the latest is 5.4.0.

[cvalarida]

Assumptions

• ~The bundle size for the unified client is larger than Raven.js~
  • It may actually be a bit smaller
• Changing all the references to Raven will be pretty straightforward
  • Looks like it will be
• The latest version of the unified client will work with our current version of Sentry
  • I'm not sure about the latest client, but it looks like we can safely upgrade to 5.1.0 at least
• We'll continue to update Sentry to take advantage of new features
  • :man_shrugging:
• The Raven client will eventually be incompatible with the version of Sentry we're on
  • I couldn't find hardly anything on compatibility, so this is hard to know
  • I found the one comment from one of the developers that said they don't support older versions of the server
• The unified client gives developers access to useful new features that we can use in our current version of Sentry
  • If nothing else, it looks like we can use Sentry Testkit in our unit tests to make sure we're sending the right things to Sentry; not sure if this is possible with raven-js (it may be, but I doubt it)

[cvalarida]

Closing in favor of https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-team/issues/288.