How to Set Up and Manage Sentry Alerts for Errors and Transactions

Alert Overview

Alerts provide real‑time visibility into code issues and their impact on users. Sentry offers Issue alerts and Metric alerts that trigger when defined conditions are met.

Issue Alerts

Issue alerts fire when any issue matches criteria such as new issues, increased frequency, or status changes from resolved to unresolved. The full list of issue‑alert triggers is documented at https://docs.sentry.io/product/alerts/create-alerts/issue-alert-config/.

Metric Alerts

Metric alerts trigger when error or transaction events exceed a metric threshold. Common metrics include Total errors, Latency (min, max, average, percentile), Failure rate, Throughput, Apdex, and custom metrics. Metric functions such as count(), count_unique(...), avg(...), percentile(...), failure_rate(), and apdex(...) are used to compute aggregate values over a selected time window.

Creating Alerts

Navigate to the Alerts page and click “Create Alert Rule”.

Select the project.

Choose “Issues” to create an issue alert or any other option to create a metric alert.

Click “Set Conditions” to define triggers, filters, and actions.

Configure the alert using the documentation links:

https://docs.sentry.io/product/alerts/create-alerts/

https://docs.sentry.io/product/alerts/create-alerts/best-practices/

Issue Alert Configuration

Environment – filter alerts by the environment tag (e.g., production, QA). Selecting “All Environments” disables the filter.

Team – associate a team so its members can edit the alert; if no team is selected, any member can edit.

Alert name – a descriptive name such as “Frontend Latency” or “Backend Failure Rate”.

When (trigger) – options include first occurrence, state change from resolved to unresolved, ignored to unresolved, frequency over a time interval, affected‑user percentage, etc.

If (filters) – filter by issue age, occurrence count, assignee, release, attribute matches (equals, does not equal, starts with, ends with, contains, is set, is not set), tag matches, and level comparisons (equal to, less than, greater than).

Then (actions) – notify issue owners, a team, or a member; send notifications to integrations such as Slack, PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams, or all legacy integrations.

Action interval (rate limit) – control how often actions fire for the same issue (e.g., 5 min, 10 min, 30 min, 1 hour, 3 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days).

Project‑level settings – customize email subject templates and summary settings for issue‑alert emails.

Metric Alert Configuration

Environment – same filtering as issue alerts.

Event type – select event.type:error, event.type:transaction, or event.type:default to limit which events are evaluated.

Tag & attribute filters – narrow alerts by URL, custom tags (e.g., customer_type), or other event properties.

Metric (function + time interval) – choose a function (e.g., count_unique(user.id) for “Number of Users Affected”) and a time window from one minute up to one day; Sentry evaluates the window every minute.

Thresholds – set Warning, Critical, and optional Resolved values; the alert status reflects the highest matching severity.

Automatic resolution – by default an alert resolves when the metric no longer exceeds Critical or Warning; a custom Resolved threshold can be defined to control when resolution occurs.

Actions – same integration options as issue alerts (Slack, PagerDuty, Teams, custom webhooks, legacy integrations).

Alert Routing and Integrations

Alerts can be routed to Slack, PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams, or custom services via the Integration Platform. Slack integration allows direct “Resolve”, “Ignore”, or “Assign” actions from the notification. PagerDuty and Teams integrations work similarly, sending alerts to the configured account and service.

Custom Integrations

If a desired destination has no built‑in integration, use the Integration Platform’s REST API or webhook to send alerts. Custom integrations appear in the “Alert actions” dropdown and can be used for aggregating alerts from multiple monitoring systems or implementing smarter routing logic.

Best Practices

Detect important problems – prioritize by frequency, number of affected users, and relevant tags (e.g., critical business pages).

Reduce alert noise – use filters such as “issue older or newer than…”, “transient issues” (issue happened at least X times), “limit to latest release”, and the “For Review” list to focus on high‑value alerts.

Issue owners – configure ownership rules under Project → Settings → Issue Owners so alerts automatically go to the right people; fallback to all project members if no owner matches.

Delivery methods by severity – route critical alerts to PagerDuty or OpsGenie, medium alerts to Slack, and low alerts to Email.

Notifications

Sentry sends workflow, deployment, quota, and weekly‑report notifications. Workflow notifications cover issue state changes, comments, assignments, user feedback, and event‑processing problems. Deployment notifications are sent when a new release is deployed. Quota notifications warn when error, transaction, or attachment usage approaches limits. Weekly reports summarize organization activity each Monday.

Managing Notifications

All notifications can be managed in User Settings > Notifications. Delivery options include Email, Slack, or both, depending on installed integrations and linked Slack accounts.

Personal Settings

Alert delivery – choose Email, Slack, or both for each project; Slack is available only if the organization has a Slack integration and the user’s Slack identity is linked.

Workflow notifications – set globally to Always, Only on subscribed issues, or Never; can be overridden per project.

Deployment notifications – set to On, Only on deploys with my commits, or Off; can be overridden per organization.

Weekly reports – enable or disable per organization.

Issue Owners

Configure ownership rules under [Project] > Settings > Issue Owners. When no rule matches, alerts default to all project members; adding a fallback rule such as *:<owner> ensures a specific owner receives the alert.

My Activity

Toggle notifications for personal actions in Sentry and for changes to unresolved, unassigned issues.