Integrating Sentry with Next.js for Automatic Tracing and Effective Error Monitoring.

Before we begin let’s make sure that we understand what Sentry is and that we have an account to work with. So Sentry is an application monitoring platform that monitors your entire application stack for performance issues crashes and exceptions. Sentry provides real-time error tracking and monitoring for applications across various programming languages.

In the dynamic landscape of web development, ensuring the stability and reliability of your applications is paramount. One key aspect of achieving this is robust error monitoring. Sentry, a popular error-tracking and monitoring tool, seamlessly integrates with Next.js, a powerful React framework for building web applications. This combination can significantly enhance your ability to identify, diagnose, and resolve issues that may arise in your Next.js projects.

If you don’t have an account now is a good time to sign up for one. Follow me and I will guide you on how to sign up and create an account in this article.

Why Sentry?

Sentry provides developers with real-time error tracking and monitoring, offering insights into issues that occur in production environments. It supports multiple programming languages and frameworks, making it a versatile choice for teams working on diverse tech stacks. By integrating Sentry with Next.js, you gain the ability to:

1. Real-Time Error Alerts: Sentry provides real-time monitoring of errors that occur within your Next.js application in production. Sentry immediately captures relevant information when an error occurs and sends you an alert. This allows you to proactively address issues before they become widespread or impact a significant number of users.
2. Diagnose Issues Effectively: Sentry captures detailed error reports, including stack traces, which offer a snapshot of the sequence of function calls leading to the error. Additionally, Sentry captures contextual information, such as the user’s browser, operating system, and specific actions that triggered the error. This wealth of information significantly accelerates the debugging process, enabling developers to understand and diagnose the root cause of issues quickly.
3. Identify and Prioritize Critical Issues: Sentry categorizes errors based on severity, frequency, and impact. This allows you to prioritize critical issues that may be affecting a large number of users or causing significant disruptions. By focusing on the most impactful issues first, you can efficiently allocate resources and address problems that have the greatest impact on user experience.
4. Performance Monitoring: Sentry not only tracks errors but also provides performance monitoring capabilities. This includes insights into the duration of API requests, database queries, and other critical operations. Monitoring the performance of your Next.js application helps you identify and resolve bottlenecks, ensuring optimal response times and a smooth user experience.
5. Release Monitoring: Sentry allows you to associate errors with specific releases of your Next.js application. This is valuable for tracking the impact of code changes and identifying whether a particular error is associated with a recent deployment. It simplifies the process of identifying when an issue is introduced and helps streamline the debugging process.
6. Collaboration and Workflow Integration: Sentry facilitates collaboration among team members by providing a centralized platform for error monitoring. Developers can leave comments, assign and track issues, and integrate Sentry with popular project management and communication tools. This streamlines the workflow and ensures everyone involved in the development process is on the same page when addressing errors.

Now, let’s walk through the steps to integrate Sentry with Next.js.

Step 1: Create a Sentry Account

If you don’t have a Sentry account, create one at Sentry.io. If you do a new login you’ll be taken to the Sentry dashboards.

Step 2: Create a New project for your Apps.

After successful signup, you will be navigated to the project page and you will find the Create New Project button. Create a new project by clicking on the Create Project button on the project screen. Select Next.js as our platform, give it a name, and hit Create Project.

Step 3: Install Sentry in your Next.js Project

Sentry provides instructions on how to set up the Next.js SDK in your project. First, you need to run the wizard. So copy the command and run it into your project.

npx @sentry/wizard@latest -i nextjs

It’s going to install the wizard package. It will take us to a login screen so we can authorize our Sentry account with our CLI app.

Sentry produced the sentry.server.config.ts, sentry.edge.config.ts, and sentry.client.config.ts files for us which are initializing Sentry in these three environments.

There’s the modified next.js.config.js file that imports the withSentryConfig method and wraps our Next.js config with it.

Step 4: Verify the Integration

After you install Sentry on your project, Run your Next.js application, and open your site on localhost 3000. Check the console or terminal if you don’t see any issues on the console that means Sentry is configured correctly. Now check out your project and make sure that you have some data.

Alright so if you open the performance page you can see that Sentry has some data for you.

The first page that you see is the issues page where you can see all the errors happening in your app and inspect all of the details about each of those errors.

There’s also the performance screen where you can look at the performance measurements of your application's front-end, back-end, mobile, and web vitals.

Then we have the replay screen where you can see how a user used our app just before a specific error happened.

Conclusion

Integrating Sentry with Next.js empowers your development team to deliver more reliable and resilient applications. Real-time error tracking and monitoring enable you to address issues proactively, resulting in improved user satisfaction and a more stable application.

Remember to customize your Sentry configuration based on your project’s specific needs, and regularly review error reports to identify areas for improvement. With Sentry and Next.js working together, you can build and maintain web applications with confidence.