I gave up on self-hosted Sentry (2024)

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Sentry’s Self-Hosting Posture

  • Sentry staff/ex-staff say self-hosting exists mainly for cases where SaaS can’t be used (e.g. regulation); the business focus is running Sentry as a cloud service.
  • They deny any deliberate attempt to make self-hosting difficult; complexity is attributed to scaling for huge multi-tenant workloads and legacy architectural choices (Kafka, Rabbit, many workers).
  • They acknowledge that self-hosted is currently “awful” and are working on changes (e.g. new task broker) to reduce container count and improve small-scale deployments.

Operational Complexity and Resource Needs

  • Many commenters were turned off by the 16GB “minimum” RAM recommendation and massive docker-compose / install script, reading it as a signal of fragility and bloat.
  • Others report that self-hosted Sentry can run reliably with Helm/Kubernetes, but only if you’re comfortable with Kafka, Redis, ClickHouse, and many containers.
  • There are complaints about upgrades occasionally breaking, Kafka queues needing manual intervention, and complex Helm/supply chain dependencies.

Cost, Scale, and When Self-Hosting Makes Sense

  • At low volume, the SaaS cost feels like overkill, and the self-host requirements feel disproportionate to small apps on 4–8GB VPSes.
  • At high volume (tens of millions of transactions/day), several teams report huge savings by self-hosting on large Hetzner servers, accepting some ops overhead.
  • Debate arises over whether these calculations properly include staff time, but some argue ops costs amortize as teams gain experience.

Alternatives and “Simpler” Tools

  • GlitchTip (a FOSS Sentry fork) and Bugsink (the article author’s product) are highlighted as lighter, self-host–friendly options; GlitchTip is praised for doing 90% of what older Sentry did with far less maintenance, though some find it buggy.
  • Other options mentioned: HyperDX, Apache SkyWalking, Grafana/Prometheus-style stacks, and very minimal custom logging solutions for basic error reporting.
  • Several readers note that for many small projects, a “dumb” database logger plus email is enough.

Incentives, Open Source, and Trust

  • Some commenters see Sentry’s own docs discouraging self-hosting (“will become more complex”) as FUD to push people to SaaS.
  • Others argue this is simply honest expectation-setting: the same architecture that powers the cloud product inevitably makes self-hosting heavy.
  • There’s broader criticism of the pattern where “open source, self-hosted” offerings become increasingly complex and effectively serve as lead magnets for paid cloud services.

Developer and User Experience

  • Local debugging with Sentry is described as heavy; running Sentry + other observability tools on a dev machine is painful.
  • Sentry’s feature depth (deduplication, release tracking, SCM/CI/issue tracker integration, regressions) is praised, and seen as going far beyond generic metrics dashboards.
  • Some dislike Sentry’s aggressive sales tactics; a Sentry representative invites people to report such experiences so they can be corrected.