Self Hosted Sentry on AWS EC2

What is Sentry and How It Helps?

Sentry is a powerful error tracking and performance monitoring tool designed to help developers identify and fix issues in their applications efficiently. It captures errors, exceptions, and performance metrics in real-time, providing insights into the root cause of issues.

Key Features of Sentry:

1. Error Monitoring: Tracks errors in real-time, providing detailed stack traces and contextual data.
2. Performance Monitoring: Monitors application performance metrics like response time, throughput, and bottlenecks.
3. User Tracking: Links errors to specific users for better debugging and personalized support.
4. Integrations: Seamlessly integrates with popular frameworks, libraries, and tools like React, Django, and Node.js.

Sentry helps teams improve user experience by proactively identifying and resolving issues before they impact end-users.

What is Self-Hosted Sentry and Why Choose It?

While Sentry offers a cloud-based solution, a self-hosted Sentry provides the same powerful features but runs on your own infrastructure. This means you maintain full control over your data, making it an excellent choice for organizations with strict security, compliance, or data residency requirements.

Benefits of Self-Hosted Sentry Over Cloud Subscription:

1. Data Privacy & Security: Your error logs and application data remain within your infrastructure, ensuring compliance with security policies. This is especially crucial for fintech applications like ours, where compliance requires keeping data within India.
2. Cost Savings: Cloud-based Sentry pricing can be expensive for high-traffic applications. Self-hosting allows you to save costs by leveraging your own infrastructure.
3. Customizability: Modify and configure Sentry according to your specific needs.
4. No Event Limits: Unlike Sentry’s cloud pricing tiers that impose data ingestion limits, a self-hosted solution provides unlimited event tracking.
5. Better Performance for Internal Apps: If your infrastructure is optimized, self-hosting Sentry can provide faster error tracking and logging than cloud-based alternatives.

However, managing a self-hosted solution requires dedicated server resources, periodic maintenance, and expertise in DevOps.

How to Host Self-Hosted Sentry: Step-by-Step Guide

Prerequisites:

• A server with at least:
• 4 CPU cores
• 16 GB RAM
• 20 GB free disk space
• Docker (version ≥19.03.6) and Docker Compose (version ≥2.23.2)
• A domain name pointing to your server’s IP

Step 1: Launch an AWS EC2 Instance

For AWS, we recommend using a t3.xlarge instance with 4 vCPUs, 16GB RAM, and 50GB storage.

1. Go to AWS EC2 and Launch an Instance.
2. Select Ubuntu 22.04 LTS as the OS.
3. Choose t3.xlarge as the instance type.
4. Configure 50GB EBS storage.
5. Set up a security group to allow ports 22 (SSH), 80 (HTTP), and 443 (HTTPS).
6. Launch the instance and SSH into it:

ssh -i your-key.pem ubuntu@your-ec2-ip

Why: EC2 provides scalable compute resources to run Sentry efficiently.

Step 2: Install Docker and Docker-Compose

# Install Dependencies for Docker
sudo apt-get install -y \
    apt-transport-https \
    ca-certificates \
    curl \
    gnupg-agent \
    software-properties-common

# Install Docker
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo add-apt-repository \
"deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) stable"
sudo apt-get update -y && sudo apt-get install -y docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io
# Install Docker-Compose
sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.26.2/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
# Make docker-compose executable
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
# Allow Docker to run without sudo
sudo groupadd docker
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
sudo reboot

Why: Docker and Docker-Compose are required to run Sentry in containers efficiently.

Step 3: Clone and Install Self-Hosted Sentry

git clone https://github.com/getsentry/onpremise.git
cd onpremise/

# Install Sentry with default configurations
./install.sh --no-user-prompt
docker-compose up -d

Why: This will pull all necessary dependencies and start Sentry services.

Step 4: Configure NGINX for HTTPS

1. Install NGINX:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install nginx -y

2. Set Up NGINX Reverse Proxy:

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/sentry

Add this configuration:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name sentry.example.com;
    return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}
server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name sentry.example.com;
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/sentry.example.com/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/sentry.example.com/privkey.pem;
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:9000;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    }
}

3. Enable Configuration:

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/sentry /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
sudo nginx -t
sudo systemctl reload nginx

4. Enable Configuration:

sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-nginx -y
sudo certbot --nginx -d sentry.example.com

How to Set Up Sentry After Hosting

1. Integrate Sentry into Your Applications

• Install the Sentry SDK:

npm install @sentry/react @sentry/tracing

Initialize Sentry in your app:

import * as Sentry from "@sentry/react";
Sentry.init({
    dsn: "https://<public_key>@sentry.example.com/<project_id>",
    integrations: [new Sentry.BrowserTracing()],
    tracesSampleRate: 1.0,
});

Conclusion

Self-hosting Sentry provides full control over error tracking and ensures compliance. Follow this guide to deploy, configure, and integrate Sentry seamlessly into your applications.