The Twelve Days of Integrations: Sentry

It’s that time of year again, though it may not quite feel it. The leaves have taken their time falling from the trees, department stores are playing Michael Buble songs on a loop to almost entirely empty rooms, and I put a little hat on my cat because it makes not leaving the house feel slightly more festive.

To celebrate, Shortcut is highlighting twelve of our integrations with a detailed write up alongside their own little digital snow globes. We hope you return every day to enjoy these posts alongside your tinglers and fuzzles, your dafflers and wuzzles, and your delicious pot (or Beyond meat) roasts.

Our fifth featured integration is one that runs its own Twelve Days of Integrations series, which in the past was written in a suspiciously similar writing style to our own, almost as if the same person started this series at both companies: Sentry.  

On this Fifth Day of Integrations, Shortcut gives to you five gold rings!

Wait, no, I mean Sentry! I just felt an irresistible urge to write "five gold rings" as I yelled it across my house. The fifth day really makes the whole Twelve Days of Christmas song work and its the only part other than the partridge in a pear tree anyone really remembers. People might get a little lost and sing just about anything for the other parts, "eight eggs a'deviled, seven hats a'jumping, six puppies mining" but will perk right up and absolutely scream "Five Gold Rings!" every time the fifth day comes around.

In the olden days, when some piece of software broke, customers complained about it, and so long as they overwhelmed support with enough emails or were loud enough on Twitter, the bugs causing that software to break got fixed.

We all still live in those olden days to some degree or another, but ideally software development will one day reach a point where customers rarely have to act as unpaid QA. Can you imagine if Civil Engineers treated people driving across a bridge they built as a sort of QA team for making sure the bridge didn't fall down?

That's where Sentry comes in. Sentry catches bugs in your code as soon as those bugs are in production. Not only that, it can tell you how many people the bug has impacted, which release it was part of it, which commit was likely responsible for it, and which developer(s) are best suited to tackle it.

Of course, before anyone can tackle anything it needs to be assigned to them so that they're fully aware of the context and can fit it in with the rest of their work. And that's where Shortcut comes in.

How does this integration work?

Our integration makes it simple to create Stories from Sentry issues (or add Sentry issues to existing Stories) and to automatically resolve these issues in Sentry by resolving the Story.

To create a Story from a Sentry Issue you'd simply click the Link Shortcut Issue option on the right hand side of the Issue screen.

You'll then see a dialog box where you can choose to Create a Story:

Or Link it to an existing one by searching for the Story's title:

Either way, once created or linked, the Story is linked and accessible from within the Sentry Issue and the Sentry Issue is linked from within the Story. You can link one Issue to multiple Stories too, if you need to do so.

Whenever the Shortcut Story is marked as done, it'll automatically mark any associated Sentry Issues as complete so that the fixed problems are no longer shown as pending there.

Use Shortcut + Sentry together to make issue tracking and bug fixing faster than ever before. Less time toggling between tools means more time spent on other things that are more enjoyable than toggling between tools, which is almost anything.