Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Pros of AWS Config
- Backed by Amazon4
- One stop solution2
Pros of Sentry
- Consolidates similar errors and makes resolution easy238
- Email Notifications121
- Open source108
- Slack integration84
- Github integration71
- Easy49
- User-friendly interface44
- The most important tool we use in production28
- Hipchat integration18
- Heroku Integration17
- Good documentation15
- Free tier14
- Self-hosted11
- Easy setup9
- Realiable7
- Provides context, and great stack trace6
- Feedback form on error pages4
- Love it baby4
- Gitlab integration3
- Filter by custom tags3
- Super user friendly3
- Captures local variables at each frame in backtraces3
- Easy Integration3
- Performance measurements1
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of AWS Config
- Not user friendly2
Cons of Sentry
- Confusing UI12
- Bundle size4