Workflow Notifications

We just shipped an overhaul to workflow notifications in Sentry. The new system splits Sentry’s notifications into two core systems: alerts and workflow. Alerts are very much the same as they always have been, but the new workflow emails are focused on improving the triage and issue management workflows.

Participation

The first thing you need to know about the new notifications is that they revolve around participation. If you use GitHub, you’ll feel right at home here as things work in a very similar way. By default you’ll participate in every conversation on a project, but you can change this to be explicit via your account settings. We’ll also explicitly mark you as participating the first time you interact with an issue, such as leaving a comment or changing the state.

All workflow email notifications are based purely on whether you’re participating or not, and will sidestep any rules configured for a project. This also means you can disable alerts and still receive workflow emails.

Settings

If you’ve previously opted out of receiving alerts, that won’t change. We have however opted you into workflow emails project-wide, which does mean you’ll now receive notifications for regressions. If you wish to change this you can do so from the Workflow email setting in Account › Settings › Notifications.

Changing the setting to only notify you when you’re participating will give you full control of when you receive emails. Don’t worry, as we’ll still automatically subscribe you to issues in which you enter as a new participant.

Expanded Notifications

In addition to splitting off notifications into two categories, we’ve also added several additionally activity-based notifications, as well as overhauled the existing.

Workflow notifications will now be generated in the following situations:

• an issue is assigned or unassigned
• a new comment was left on an issue
• the state of an issue changes to resolved
• an issue is reopened due to a regression

Looking Forward

This is just the beginning of a large number of changes we’re making to notifications to improve your error monitoring experience with Sentry. We’re focused on making sure they work well in both small and large organizations, and you’ll be seeing some great additions (like a weekly summary) show up in the next few weeks. So, whether you want to debug Node, do Ruby error tracking, or handle an obscure Java exception, we’ll be working hard to provide the best possible experience for you and your team!