Shared Issues are Changing for the Better

Did you know there’s a Sentry feature that enables easy, quick sharing of issues with engineers and other folks in your company, regardless of whether they’re part of your Sentry org? We do. It’s very appropriately called Shared Issues, and you can find it on an event’s details page.

Before you run off to use it though, fair warning: we’re about to break it.

That seems kinda rude. Why are we telling you about it then?

Because we’re breaking it to improve it.

Since Shared Issue links are meant to be passed around, we provide a public URL that removes a lot of sensitive data connected to the issue, giving you a look at the stack trace of where the error occurred alongside a link back to the full issue that anyone with access to the project can use to view the error in more detail.

In its present implementation, the share link is just there: you get the link, you share it, it works forever. That’s nice and functional, but there are a variety of reasons you might not want a potentially public URL (even one that contains zero sensitive info) to keep working until the end of time.

Maybe an engineer’s grandma got ahold of it and posted it on Facebook to proudly show off what her grandchild has been doing at work. Maybe you’ve decided that none of the product managers need to have access to it anymore. Whatever the reason, it’d be nice to have more control. Which is exactly what we’ll shortly be providing.

In our upcoming release, Shared Issues will include significantly more control over all shareable URLs:

• The URL isn’t generated until you click an event’s Share button and choose to Share this event

• Once the URL is generated, you can change it to an entirely different link by hitting the Generate new private URL button, and the old URL will immediately stop working

• You can turn off Share this event at any time so that the event and issue can no longer be shared

The feature will also be a lot easier to find, right under a Share button at the top of each issue.

Here’s the bad news. Any shareable URLs currently associated with an issue will break the minute this release goes out and will need to be replaced by the improved URLs provided by the release. This was the best approach to ensuring every link is fully secure and compliant with our new standards.

If you have questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with support.  You’ll have access to the new version of Shared Issues later this week.