How ChartHop leverages Error Monitoring to save Dev Cycles
Big ideas need creative solutions. Creative solutions mean solving out of the box engineering problems. When you’re solving these new problems, strong error monitoring is imperative to the development cycle. You don’t want to spend all your time chasing down issues and struggling to track the source of errors.
This is why ChartHop, an organization management platform designed to help teams scale intentionally, brought in Sentry early in the company’s development, saving developers time week over week.
Why ChartHop Chose Sentry
Ian White, ChartHop’s Founder/CEO/CTO, is no stranger to software development. He’s been writing code since he was 10 years old! Prior to starting ChartHop, Ian was the first MongoDB Master, built the first CMS at Business Insider and founded a wildly successful email marketing business, Sailthru.
Being someone who has writing high-quality software in his DNA, Ian leverages error monitoring to make sure his customers have a flawless experience. Ian first started using Sentry several years ago to capture errors on a JavaScript project during a consulting opportunity. Right off the bat, he and his engineering partner found Sentry easy to navigate and were able to parse through errors quickly. After this initial positive experience, Ian knew he wasn’t going to start a business without Sentry and made sure ChartHop implemented Sentry from the very beginning.
Standout Monitoring and Improved Developer Experience
“In the early days with just 1000s of users,” Ian remembers, “understanding the user experience was critical for us. We were able to catch errors with Sentry before customers could report them or before they hit our support queue.” Now, ChartHop relies on Sentry’s Error Monitoring across their entire stack.
Just like many modern SaaS businesses, ChartHop invests in log aggregation and metric monitoring tools in addition to Sentry. However, according to Ian, “We use Sentry more often than any other monitoring tool.”
We use Sentry more often than any other monitoring tool
As they’ve continued to grow, the ChartHop team relies on Sentry to triage errors or to solve customer issues as quickly as possible. Without Sentry, getting to the bottom of these issues would be a cumbersome process. Developers would have to comb through logs just to diagnose the issue. With Sentry, ChartHop gets rich notifications via email or Slack and can likely diagnose bugs right from the notification. If they need more information, the dev team jumps in the issue to look up the suspect commit from GitHub or stack trace — gone are the days of looking for needles in code haystacks.
Conservatively, ChartHop believes Sentry saves at least one hour per developer per week, plus, the actual time spent on issues is cut by at least half with Sentry. These numbers add up to big savings and room for operational improvement, allowing a lean, disruptive company like ChartHop to build industry-changing technology and grow fast. ChartHop is disrupting the industry with a totally new approach to understanding how an organization has evolved and planning its future, earning a fresh round of funding from a16z. With Sentry helping developers resolve issues faster and prevent errors from reaching customers, it’s a bright future for ChartHop.