Sentry: Self-Hosted Error Tracking and Performance Monitoring

Sentry is a developer-first error tracking and performance monitoring platform that helps teams discover, triage, and resolve code issues in real time. With over 43,000 GitHub stars, Sentry is the most widely adopted open-source error monitoring tool, supporting 100+ platforms and languages including Python, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Java, .NET, and mobile SDKs. It captures errors with full stack traces, breadcrumbs, and context so developers can fix bugs faster.

Self-hosting Sentry means your error data, stack traces, and user context stay on your own servers — critical for applications handling sensitive information.

Key Features

• Real-time error tracking with stack traces, breadcrumbs, and contextual data for rapid debugging
• Performance monitoring with transaction tracing, slow query detection, and latency analysis
• Release tracking that correlates errors with specific deployments and code changes
• Issue grouping and deduplication that collapses similar errors into actionable issues
• Alert rules with Slack, email, PagerDuty, and webhook notifications for team escalation
• SDK support for 100+ platforms including web, mobile, backend, and serverless environments
• Source map and debug symbol upload for readable stack traces in minified production code
• Session replay for understanding user actions that led to an error

Why Self-Host Sentry?

Error data contains sensitive information. Stack traces, request payloads, user context, and session data captured by Sentry can include PII, authentication tokens, and business logic details. Self-hosting ensures this data stays in your infrastructure and never reaches external servers.

No event volume pricing. Sentry's cloud plans charge based on event volume, which can spike unpredictably during incidents — exactly when you need monitoring most. Self-hosted Sentry has no per-event costs. Capture every error, transaction, and session without budgeting for volume spikes.

Network integration. Self-hosted Sentry can monitor internal services, staging environments, and private network applications without exposing them to the internet. SDKs send data directly to your Sentry server on your network.

Full data retention control. You control how long error data, performance traces, and session replays are stored. Set retention policies that match your compliance requirements without being limited by a cloud plan's storage tiers.

System Requirements

Resource	Minimum	Recommended
CPU	4 vCPUs	8+ vCPUs
RAM	8 GB	16 GB
Storage	40 GB SSD	100 GB SSD
OS	Ubuntu 22.04+	Ubuntu 24.04

Self-hosted Sentry runs a complex stack including PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, ClickHouse, Snuba, and multiple worker processes. It is significantly more resource-intensive than most self-hosted applications. The 8 GB RAM minimum is a hard floor — Sentry will not start reliably with less.

Getting Started

The fastest way to deploy Sentry on your VPS is with Docker Compose through Dokploy. Our step-by-step deployment guide walks you through the full setup, including persistent storage, environment configuration, and SSL.

Deploy Sentry with Dokploy →

Alternatives

• GlitchTip — Lightweight open-source error tracking compatible with Sentry SDKs but with far lower resource requirements
• Highlight.io — Open-source monitoring platform combining error tracking, session replay, and log aggregation
• Uptrace — Open-source APM tool with distributed tracing and metrics powered by OpenTelemetry
• Grafana — Observability platform with dashboards, alerting, and log aggregation for infrastructure monitoring

FAQ

How much resources does self-hosted Sentry actually need? Self-hosted Sentry is resource-heavy. The official recommendation is a minimum of 4 CPU cores and 8 GB RAM, but 16 GB RAM is strongly recommended for production use. The stack includes Kafka, ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, Redis, and multiple worker processes. Budget more resources than most self-hosted apps.

Can I use Sentry SDKs with the self-hosted version? Yes. The same official Sentry SDKs work with self-hosted Sentry. You just point the DSN (Data Source Name) to your self-hosted server URL instead of sentry.io. All SDK features — error capture, performance tracing, session replay — work identically.

Is self-hosted Sentry the same as sentry.io? Self-hosted Sentry is the open-source version of the platform. It includes core error tracking, performance monitoring, and alerting. Some features available on sentry.io (like advanced issue workflows and integrations) may not be available or may lag behind the cloud version.

How do I handle Sentry upgrades? Sentry provides an install.sh script and upgrade documentation. Upgrades involve pulling new Docker images and running database migrations. Pin your version and test upgrades in staging first — the multi-service architecture means upgrades need care.

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App data sourced from selfh.st open-source directory.