How DoctorC Scales Healthcare Tech with Sentry
DoctorC is a healthcare company based out of India that brings medical lab testing to the end-user.
Throughout the growth of DoctorC, Sentry error monitoring has helped their engineering meet the unique technical challenges in digital healthcare. With Sentry’s platform, DoctorC has significantly improved the quality of their code and saved developers 5 to 10 hours a week of debugging time.
From On-Prem to SaaS: Unlocking Error Monitoring with Sentry
Before Sentry, Karan Kurani, CTO of DoctorC used Django’s built-in error handler. He and the team would sift through email alerts after errors occurred in production. As DoctorC’s application traffic and usage increased this practice became untenable, there were simply too many error warnings and it was impossible to decide what to actually tackle. So they graduated to Sentry’s open-source offering and hosted it themselves.
Karan loved the ability to group issues, see user impact, and get a full stack trace. What was once email noise, now became a streamlined and easy to prioritize list of highest impact issues to resolve. But, as many of us know, managing software needs constant TLC. Every security change or version upgrade would take Karan at a minimum of one day to configure and set up. DoctorC wasn’t running a Docker-based environment, so anytime they made a change, he’d have to spend time ramping up and remembering what was done months before. According to DoctorC’s co-founder, this was far from a pleasant experience.
Not to mention he was hosting Sentry on AWS. He realized he could continue to pay for the hosting costs, and spend a considerable amount of time maintaining his own Sentry instance, or move to Sentry’s SaaS offering for essentially the same monthly costs and get a bunch of time back. Karan found instant value through the switch to Sentry’s cloud-based error monitoring platform.
Increasing Productivity with Frequency Sorting
Sentry does the heavy lifting for the team with backend monitoring by surfacing the frequency of specific errors. DoctorC’s small engineering team can’t fix everything, so the error frequency from Sentry helps them hone in on the most important and pressing issues. The CTO goes in once a week, sorts on frequency then assigns issues to appropriate engineering. Sentry’s stack trace features help the team find all the information they need quickly.
How Sentry Prevents Negative Impact Outside of Engineering
Sentry has proven instrumental DoctorC’s growth from one to five engineers. Some of the errors they discover because of Sentry not only saves time but saves them from many headaches, On average, Sentry saves 5 to 10 hours of developer pain each week by catching errors super early, because DoctorC errors go far beyond engineering. For example, if an order is booked incorrectly because of a bug in their lab booking system, it kicks off a chain of events that can’t be reverted with a hotfix. First, the lab collecting samples is impacted because they’re routed to the wrong patient, then the internal operations team has to manually contact the lab and patient to try and reroute everyone, and eventually, management at DoctorC has to figure out a comms plan for the patient., DoctorC uses Sentry to maintain customer trust with an all-in approach to customer success and delivering a reliable service that makes lab testing accessible to everyone.
Sentry helps DoctorC continue to scale in the challenging healthcare industry, during a challenging time, where digital services are not only incredibly important but operating under strict regulations and time constraints. In their line of work, there is no margin for errors — literally.