Sentry for HipChat Connect

Sentry is more useful when notifications arrive exactly where you want them. That’s why we’ve always put emphasis on supporting a wide range of notification systems for any error tracking workflow. Group chat plugins, especially, are among our most popular integrations.

When Atlassian informed us that they are planning a new improved integration system called HipChat Connect, we were excited to see how we could leverage these new features into a powerful new Sentry plugin.

The result: Sentry’s best group chat plugin yet. Read on to find out what’s new.

Cards and Glances

The biggest upside of seeing Sentry notifications in your chat client is also the biggest downside: everybody gets them, whether they’re interested or not. This means there is a fine line to walk about how much information to provide with such notifications. Too much and they lose their usefulness because they take over the communication in the room; too little and they are not effective in communicating what you need to address the problem.

One of the new features in the HipChat integration allows us to provide expandable messages (cards) where we can provide the most important information right there, and extra information becomes available when the card is expanded. If you need even more information, you can open up the event details in a glance in the sidebar of your HipChat client.

We now also render cards for links to events you paste into a HipChat channel. This easily allows people to figure out what is being talked about without having to click through the link.

Establishing context

We also now provide support for establishing a bit of context of what is being talked about in a HipChat room with regards to Sentry. Every event that is being notified or mentioned is automatically memorized for a work day in a glance for the room. This allows you to quickly discover events again that were mentioned in the last few hours without having to scan the backlog.

Act on Events

With the new HipChat plugin, you can now perform some limited actions directly on events without having to go to Sentry. For example, if you see an event notification, you can assign yourself or a team member to the event right from within the comfort of your HipChat client.

Where can I get it?

The new integration is available now for HipChat Cloud. You can also find more information about the integration in the Atlassian marketplace or by browsing the GitHub repository.

Happy chatting.