F5 Beacon vs. Sentry

It is very well suited in complex, multi-cloud application environments where it provides holistic, application-centric visibility by ingesting data from NGINX and other telemetry sources. It helps troubleshoot performance issues in high-availability and regulated environments where outages have a high impact on strict SLAs. It is less appropriate in situations where organizations rely on unmaintained or archived integrations.

[Sentry] is honestly an amazing product. It allows us to detect errors in real time complete with stack traces and any extra accompanying information the developer wants to provide in the alert. With the alerting into Slack it has allowed us to quickly triage and tag in people who need eyes on a specific issue. It would be really useful in any Saas product environment.

Incentivized

• It supports seamless multi cloud and hybrid monitoring with easy integration.
• It provides actionable insights for faster troubleshooting.
• It delivers comprehensive end to end application visibility.

• It collects very detailed information on problems that happen to our users while using the platform
• It supplies very good tools in order to aggregate the collected data and analyze it
• It integrates with Slack, making it easier to "monitor it in real time"

Incentivized

• F5 needs improvement in Platform Stability and Maintenance gaps.
• It has limited built-in insights and relies heavily on customization.
• Application modeling and data ingestion setup is complex.

• if we could decrease the costing via some kind of sampling of errors.
• sometimes same error is in loop and Sentry will count all the events for pricing if there is any way this can be reduced.
• self hosted capabilities or using own storage to reduce cost.

Incentivized

The reason for the above rating is that F5 Beacon delivers clear visibility, helpful insights, and streamlined decision-making, which, in turn, translates into a better user experience. Beacon easily ingests telemetry from multiple sources, including NGINX, BIG-IP devices, and third-party platforms. The Beacon insight engine generates actionable recommendations and performs anomaly detection.

Its incredibly versatile, but that leads to complexity for the uninitiated, which can be intimidating. Nevertheless its a well polished product, in our case leading to only using it for a focus on frontend is still more cost effective than buying a one-to-rule-them-all tool...

Incentivized

F5 Beacon is best for F5-centric, hybrid, app-centric visibility, whereas Datadog is best for cloud-native, distributed observability. F5 beacon is superior for understanding BIG-IP flows, WAF, ADC behavior at the app level. It has a unified view of F5-powered applications. F5 Beacon simplifies troubleshooting across multicloud F5 deployments. Beacon provides business logic level visibility.

We actually ended up using both because New Relic is a more robust overall IT infrastructure monitoring product. However, sentry is more developer oriented on the backend and more client friendly on the front end as far as showing results and the dashboard etc. It can provide product level insights that New Relic does not.

Incentivized

• Positive - It provides deep, application-centric visibility by aggregating telemetry from NGINX and other sources.
• Positive - It improved decision making about scaling, security, and resource allocation.
• Negative - Setup and Maintenance is a bit complex.

• Error tracking is a must in any modern dynamic website or app. By looking into the error notifications I'm able to fix errors before anyone even has a chance to complain about them!
• Surprisingly, many website issues aren't showing up in Sentry, because they don't trigger exceptions. I'm interested in seeing if I can use Sentry to catch manually-triggered exceptions for "undesirable states" that my website can find itself in. Of course, that means I have to figure out how to have my client code recognize that it's in an undesirable state...

Incentivized