How Reciprocity Improves Application Health with Error Monitoring
Customer support teams are a crucial part of any enterprise service, and in the world of Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) Software, these teams need to be focused on supporting critical customer needs, not troubleshooting application errors that have reached the customer.
Sentry has proved to be a pivotal part of the toolset for industry-leading GRC software company Reciprocity.
Preventing the Preventable: Catching Errors with Sentry
Understanding the need for improved error monitoring, in order to identify and tackle issues before they gain momentum, Reciprocity incorporated Sentry into the San Francisco-based company’s stack. Reciprocity is the creator of ZenGRC, a groundbreaking security solution for compliance and risk management. Reciprocity recognized early on that this application needed proper monitoring to keep the needs of its customers first.
Sentry is like vitamins for your application. Take your vitamins now to prevent poor application health when it’s older.
Don Brown, Principal Architect at Reciprocity, has a clear vision for Sentry monitoring and the development of ZenGRC. According to Don, “Sentry is like vitamins for your application. Take your vitamins now to prevent poor application health when it’s older.” Don went on to explain, “Sentry is the starting point for resolving issues. Rich context about the error keeps the team from digging through logs to diagnose an issue.”
Proper Error Monitoring = Happy Customers
Why is it important to catch errors and handle them ahead of time? The Reciprocity support team to customer ratio is roughly 1:200 handling between 50 to 100 support tickets each day. On average, it could take a week to resolve the issues. If this support process is caused by preventable software errors on Recriprocity’s side, it can produce some seriously unhappy customers. When you deal with corporate compliance software, a week of unresolved issues is a big deal.
If we didn’t use Sentry, we’d accumulate so many errors that customers would definitely start churning.
Sentry prevents many of these issues before they can surface to customers, and at a number that, according to Don, would negatively impact the business. Don explained, “If we didn’t use Sentry, we’d accumulate so many errors that customers would definitely start churning.” Since Sentry catches the errors before customers do, it saves Reciprocity and its customers time and money.
The Reciprocity Workflow
How does Reciprocity incorporate Sentry into the development workflow?
Each development team at Reciprocity conducts a tech support rotation. The developer on rotation will check Sentry for new error messages, and associate the issue with a Jira ticket. Then, the developer will assign the ticket to a squad where it will be prioritized and tackled accordingly.
Sentry is the starting point for resolving issues. Rich context about the error keeps the team from digging through logs to diagnose an issue.
Don sees Sentry playing an essential role in filtering the signal from the noise for these teams, making it much more manageable to fix issues, “Sentry is the starting point for resolving issues. Rich context about the error keeps the team from digging through logs to diagnose an issue.”
Sentry has helped Reciprocity turn a potentially unmanageable situation — unbalancing a lean customer support team with customer-facing bugs — into a strong development process that keeps its industry-leading applications watertight and its clients happy.