How one influencer marketing platform replaced three tools with Sentry—and sped up debugging 20x

Grin is a fast-growing influencer marketing platform helping brands build authentic relationships with creators. As the company scaled, the engineering team hit a familiar challenge: a fragmented observability stack that added friction and slowed down development.

Too many tools, not enough signalToo many tools, not enough signal

Before Sentry, Grin relied on a combination of not one, not two, but three observability tools to make sure their entire stack was covered. While this configuration offered performance and error monitoring, it created more confusion than clarity.

“We had an infra tool and APM tool and also a crash reporting tool at that moment,” said Jorge, a Senior Engineering Manager at Grin. “So, three tools that kind of overlap depending on how you use them. We needed to centralize and also to use the tools to the best of their abilities.”

Grin’s existing error tracking tool was noisy. Performance issues were even more painful.

“It was frustrating—basic performance questions like connecting a slow database query to the end-user experience required piecing together logs, metrics, and traces by hand.”

How Sentry paid for itself in five minutesHow Sentry paid for itself in five minutes

While a few Grin team members were demoing Sentry to the rest of the company as a potential replacement, serendipity happened. They didn’t seed simulated errors for the demo; instead, when a real bug appeared, they tracked it down and resolved it on the spot.

Sentry showed them that one page was loading painfully slow for the users that needed it most. It was taking 50+ seconds to load for power users; in some cases, it wouldn’t load at all.

Using Session Replay and Tracing together, the team was able to watch a real user session and identify the exact moment and location where things slowed down. Within five minutes, they had found the problem.

“It was just a matter of reloading the page, seeing the replay, looking at the requests, and then checking the trace,” Jorge recalled. “And in five minutes, we saw what the problem was.”

The fix was simple. By making a section of the page load asynchronously, the team reduced load times from 50 seconds to under 10 seconds — an 80% improvement.

“I didn’t know Sentry had Session Replay and Tracing,” Jorge admitted. “The conversation quickly shifted from ‘should we switch?’ to ‘how fast can we move?’

What Jorge estimates would have taken a full week of debugging was solved in a single meeting.

“In just the demo for Sentry, Sentry already paid for itself.”

Observability without the overhead: why Grin chose SentryObservability without the overhead: why Grin chose Sentry

The biggest reason for switching from Datadog to Sentry was the setup experience. “We needed something that works right away,” Jorge said. “Something intuitive. Something that we can just benefit from immediately.”

For a lean engineering team, time spent configuring dashboards and toggling filters was time away from shipping product. Sentry gave Grin a unified view into errors, performance issues, and user behavior, with almost no ramp-up time.

Even without formal onboarding, engineers started using Sentry as if it had always been part of their stack. “It’s been very easy. We haven’t even had onboarding sessions and everybody’s already using Sentry,” Jorge said.

ResultsResults

Since adopting Sentry, Grin has seen several clear wins in both performance and productivity:

Reduced Page Load Time by 80% A key platform page improved from 50 seconds to under 10 seconds after identifying and fixing a performance bottleneck using Sentry tracing and session replay.

95% Faster Debugging for Database Issues Identifying slow queries now takes just minutes instead of hours or a full day. This means engineers can resolve backend performance problems up to 20 times faster.

Instant Adoption Across Engineering Team Sentry required no formal onboarding. Engineers were productive with the tool within hours, accelerating time to value.

Fewer Tools, More Visibility By consolidating three tools into one, Grin reduced cognitive overhead and gained a unified source of truth for performance and errors.

Proactive Customer Support Developers use session replay to spot user friction even before an error is thrown, helping the team support users faster and reduce churn.

APM that helps Grin ship faster, with confidenceAPM that helps Grin ship faster, with confidence

For Grin, Sentry isn’t just a replacement for a legacy tool. It’s a faster, more intuitive way to build and maintain reliable software.

“Everything together — the whole combo — that’s the part that’s very valuable for us,” Jorge said. With one platform for error monitoring, performance tracing, and user replay, the Grin team can move faster and stay focused on delivering value to their customers.