chadwhitacre
commented
1 year ago @tuaris I was a Sentry user for 10 years before I started working here. Like you, I brought Sentry with me to every company I've been at from my own startups to larger co's. Now that I'm employed here, my team (myself, @hubertdeng123 and @azaslavsky) is responsible for maintaining self-hosted ... and about five other things. We're doing our job in good faith, and I'm sorry we're giving off the wrong vibe. 😞
You're right that there's a little weirdness because Sentry is a company. There's some friction we wouldn't have if this were a non-commercial open source project. We would have other friction, of course, and in any case the die is cast. We're in the situation we're in, and we've got the tradeoffs we've got. Let's do our best with it.
To me the documentation gap seems like a symptom, the root problem being that we've got a pretty thin community around self-hosted Sentry right now. Not zero! But it could be better. We need to grow the community so that we can trust each other more and improve the self-hosted experience together. To be honest, writing up the sort of docs you're suggesting sounds to me like a fantastic contribution for a community member to make. That would free up Hubert, Alex and myself to focus on bigger challenges such as our chronic failure to smoothly deliver new product features in self-hosted and firefighting in the meantime.
We've got five 👍 on this issue. Is anyone up for writing some docs? 👀
P.S. I'll also put in a plug here for our quarterly Self-hosted Sesh online hangout (discord, gcal), we have an hour set aside for this on August 2. If that doesn't work or you want to talk 1:1, I've just set up a booking page where you can set up time to talk about contributing to self-hosted. :-)
aldy505
chipzzz
Problem Statement
I've been following Sentry for a while, I've used both the hosted and self-hosted versions any many of my companies past and present. Will continue to do so in the future wherever my career takes me. Sentry is a unique solution that's hard to replicate.
As great as it is, there is one thing about the product (or culture around Sentry), that's not so great.
You guys tend to throw the self-hosted (or as you used to call it 'on-prem') option by the wayside. You provide this wonderful tool for people to use and to self-host. However at the same time you constantly give out the vibe that you'd rather not do that and that the only reason you provide the self hosted option is to get your users so stressed about the self-hosted option that they will eventually move to the hosted options.
Whatever, I get it, your are a business that's here to make money.
One of the reasons you give for the lack of "support" towards self-hosted users is that you do not wish to spend resources providing help due to the different configurations people would have. I have two arguments against that, #1 your "dockerized" solution (as much as I despise Docker) isn't different across installations, it's standardized. Secondly, you are already spending resources by trying to pull back on the resources. I see countless instances of Sentry staff responding to questions and explaining how something 'could' work. More often than not, repeated over and over.
Solution Brainstorm
Just dedicate some staff to writing concise documentation for how to do the most common operations for self-hosted. It's not difficult to identify what the majority of your self-hosted users want and do. Simple things like external database servers, external Redis, cleanup, upgrades.
Don't just push people to the hosted solution. Hosted isn't for everyone for various reasons, technical or political. Why even have the self-hosted option otherwise.
A great example...
"How do I as a self hosted user migrate my database to AWS RDS without breaking my current system and future upgrades" "How do I as a self hosted user use an external Redis cache" etc...