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AWS Config vs Sentry: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will compare AWS Config and Sentry, two popular tools used for monitoring and managing applications. Both tools serve unique purposes and provide distinct features that cater to different needs in the development and operations ecosystem.

  1. Scalability: AWS Config is a fully managed service that helps assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of AWS resources. It provides an automated and scalable solution for maintaining configuration history, change tracking, and compliance checking across an AWS infrastructure. On the other hand, Sentry is an error monitoring and alerting tool that primarily focuses on tracking and reporting application errors. It offers scalability by effortlessly handling high volume error events and providing real-time visibility into application health.

  2. Functionality: AWS Config delivers a comprehensive view of the configuration of AWS resources and their relationships, enabling administrators to ensure that their infrastructure is compliant with the desired configurations. It also offers continuous monitoring for changes in configurations and alerts users when deviations occur. Sentry, on the other hand, focuses on capturing and reporting application errors, providing stack traces, aggregated error statistics, and real-time notifications to assist developers in identifying and resolving issues promptly.

  3. Data Collection: AWS Config automatically collects configuration details of AWS resources via an agent-based or agentless approach. It captures the configuration of resources and stores it in the AWS Config service for analysis and tracking. In contrast, Sentry collects error data by capturing errors and exceptions generated within the application code. It offers various SDKs and integrations to capture and report errors from different programming languages and frameworks.

  4. Integration: AWS Config seamlessly integrates with other AWS services and tools, such as AWS CloudTrail and AWS Config Rules, to provide enhanced configuration management capabilities. It leverages AWS CloudTrail's logs to track and audit changes in resources and supports custom rules for evaluating configuration compliance. Sentry integrates with popular development platforms, frameworks, and error reporting tools to capture and report application errors. It provides plugins and integrations with tools like JIRA, GitHub, and Slack to facilitate issue tracking and collaboration.

  5. Compliance Monitoring: AWS Config offers a range of pre-configured rules to assess the compliance of AWS resources against industry standards and best practices. It allows users to define custom rules and profiles to meet specific compliance requirements. On the other hand, Sentry focuses on capturing and reporting errors and does not provide built-in compliance monitoring features.

  6. Use Case: AWS Config is widely used in environments where auditing, compliance, and configuration management are critical, such as highly regulated industries and organizations with complex infrastructure setups. Sentry, on the other hand, is primarily utilized by developers and DevOps teams to monitor and troubleshoot software applications, identifying and resolving errors to ensure a seamless user experience.

In summary, AWS Config and Sentry serve different purposes and offer distinct functionalities. AWS Config focuses on configuration and compliance management in AWS environments, while Sentry is specialized in error monitoring and reporting for software applications. Both tools have their specific use cases and can be combined to provide comprehensive monitoring and management capabilities for applications running in AWS.

Decisions about AWS Config and Sentry

I essentially inherited a Shopify theme that was originally created by an agency. After discovering a number of errors being thrown in the Dev Console just by scrolling through the website, I needed more visibility over any errors happening in the field. Having used both Sentry and TrackJS, I always got lost in the TrackJS interface, so I felt more comfortable introducing Sentry. The Sentry free tier is also very generous, although it turns out the theme threw over 15k errors in less than a week.

I highly recommend setting up error tracking from day one. Theoretically, you should never need to upgrade from the free tier if you're keeping on top of the errors...

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Pros of AWS Config
Pros of Sentry
  • 4
    Backed by Amazon
  • 2
    One stop solution
  • 238
    Consolidates similar errors and makes resolution easy
  • 121
    Email Notifications
  • 108
    Open source
  • 84
    Slack integration
  • 71
    Github integration
  • 49
    Easy
  • 44
    User-friendly interface
  • 28
    The most important tool we use in production
  • 18
    Hipchat integration
  • 17
    Heroku Integration
  • 15
    Good documentation
  • 14
    Free tier
  • 11
    Self-hosted
  • 9
    Easy setup
  • 7
    Realiable
  • 6
    Provides context, and great stack trace
  • 4
    Feedback form on error pages
  • 4
    Love it baby
  • 3
    Gitlab integration
  • 3
    Filter by custom tags
  • 3
    Super user friendly
  • 3
    Captures local variables at each frame in backtraces
  • 3
    Easy Integration
  • 1
    Performance measurements

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Cons of AWS Config
Cons of Sentry
  • 2
    Not user friendly
  • 12
    Confusing UI
  • 4
    Bundle size

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What is AWS Config?

AWS Config is a fully managed service that provides you with an AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security and governance. With AWS Config you can discover existing AWS resources, export a complete inventory of your AWS resources with all configuration details, and determine how a resource was configured at any point in time. These capabilities enable compliance auditing, security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting.

What is Sentry?

Sentry’s Application Monitoring platform helps developers see performance issues, fix errors faster, and optimize their code health.

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What companies use AWS Config?
What companies use Sentry?
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What tools integrate with AWS Config?
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What are some alternatives to AWS Config and Sentry?
AWS CloudTrail
With CloudTrail, you can get a history of AWS API calls for your account, including API calls made via the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and higher-level AWS services (such as AWS CloudFormation). The AWS API call history produced by CloudTrail enables security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing. The recorded information includes the identity of the API caller, the time of the API call, the source IP address of the API caller, the request parameters, and the response elements returned by the AWS service.
New Relic
The world’s best software and DevOps teams rely on New Relic to move faster, make better decisions and create best-in-class digital experiences. If you run software, you need to run New Relic. More than 50% of the Fortune 100 do too.
Kibana
Kibana is an open source (Apache Licensed), browser based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana is a snap to setup and start using. Kibana strives to be easy to get started with, while also being flexible and powerful, just like Elasticsearch.
Grafana
Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.
Amazon CloudWatch
It helps you gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. It retrieve your monitoring data, view graphs to help take automated action based on the state of your cloud environment.
See all alternatives