Is Sentry Down? How to Check Sentry Status & Debug Event Ingestion Issues

Is Sentry Down? How to Check Sentry Status & Debug Event Ingestion Issues

Quick Answer: To check if Sentry is down, visit apistatuscheck.com/api/sentry for real-time monitoring, or check the official status.sentry.io page. Common signs include events not appearing in your dashboard, DSN connection failures, source map upload errors, delayed alerts, and integration failures with Slack, Jira, or GitHub.

When your error monitoring suddenly goes silent, you're flying blind. Sentry captures millions of exceptions and performance events every minute for development teams worldwide, making any downtime a critical visibility gap. Whether you're seeing missing error events, DSN authentication failures, or stalled alert notifications, knowing how to quickly verify Sentry's operational status can save you hours of debugging and prevent production incidents from going unnoticed.

How to Check Sentry Status in Real-Time

1. API Status Check (Fastest Method)

The quickest way to verify Sentry's operational status is through apistatuscheck.com/api/sentry. This real-time monitoring service:

  • Tests actual API endpoints every 60 seconds
  • Monitors event ingestion pipeline across all regions
  • Tracks response times and latency trends
  • Shows historical uptime over 30/60/90 days
  • Provides instant alerts when issues are detected
  • Monitors both SaaS and self-hosted health indicators

Unlike status pages that may lag behind actual issues, API Status Check performs active health checks against Sentry's production endpoints, giving you immediate visibility into service availability.

2. Official Sentry Status Page

Sentry maintains status.sentry.io as their official communication channel for service incidents. The page displays:

  • Current operational status for all services
  • Active incidents and ongoing investigations
  • Scheduled maintenance windows
  • Historical incident timeline
  • Component-specific status (Event Ingestion, Web UI, Issue Alerts, Source Maps, Integrations)
  • Regional status for different data centers

Pro tip: Subscribe to status updates via email, Slack, or webhook on the status page to receive immediate notifications when incidents occur or are resolved.

3. Check Your Sentry Dashboard

If the Sentry dashboard at sentry.io is behaving abnormally, this often indicates infrastructure issues:

  • Login failures or authentication timeouts
  • Issue stream not loading or showing stale data
  • Search queries timing out or returning errors
  • Project settings pages failing to load
  • Release pages not displaying recent deploys

Pay attention to browser console errors—JavaScript errors from Sentry's frontend can indicate CDN or API gateway issues.

4. Test Event Ingestion Directly

For developers, sending a test event can quickly confirm the ingestion pipeline is working:

// JavaScript/Node.js
Sentry.captureMessage('Sentry health check test', 'info');

// Check if the event appears in your dashboard within 5-10 seconds

# Python
sentry_sdk.capture_message("Sentry health check test", level="info")

If test events don't appear within 30 seconds, there's likely an ingestion issue. Check both your DSN configuration and Sentry's overall status.

5. Monitor SDK Health Endpoints

Implement a health check endpoint that validates Sentry connectivity:

// Express.js health check
app.get('/health/sentry', async (req, res) => {
  try {
    const eventId = Sentry.captureMessage('Health check', {
      level: 'info',
      tags: { healthCheck: true }
    });
    
    if (eventId) {
      res.json({ status: 'healthy', sentryEventId: eventId });
    } else {
      res.status(503).json({ status: 'degraded', error: 'No event ID returned' });
    }
  } catch (error) {
    res.status(503).json({ status: 'unhealthy', error: error.message });
  }
});

This allows your monitoring infrastructure to detect Sentry connectivity issues before they impact production debugging.

Common Sentry Issues and How to Identify Them

Event Ingestion Delays

Symptoms:

  • Events taking minutes or hours to appear in dashboard
  • Event count in dashboard doesn't match what you're sending
  • Real-time issue stream frozen or lagging significantly
  • Quota usage metrics delayed or incorrect

What it means: Sentry's event ingestion pipeline processes events asynchronously. Delays usually indicate backend processing bottlenecks, database slowdowns, or queue backups affecting the entire platform or specific projects.

How to diagnose:

// Send a timestamped event and measure latency
const testEventId = Sentry.captureException(new Error('Ingestion latency test'), {
  tags: { 
    test: true,
    sentAt: new Date().toISOString()
  }
});

console.log(`Sent test event: ${testEventId}`);
// Check dashboard to see when it appears

DSN Connection Failures

Common error patterns:

Failed to send event to Sentry: Network request failed
Error: connect ETIMEDOUT [Sentry IP]
SSL certificate problem: unable to get local issuer certificate
HTTP 401: Invalid DSN or authentication token

Root causes:

  • Network connectivity: Firewall blocking Sentry endpoints (especially in corporate environments)
  • DNS issues: Unable to resolve o[NUMBER].ingest.sentry.io domains
  • Certificate problems: Outdated SSL certificates or corporate SSL interception
  • Invalid DSN: Typo in configuration or revoked DSN key

Diagnostic steps:

# Test DNS resolution
nslookup o12345.ingest.sentry.io

# Test connectivity
curl -I https://o12345.ingest.sentry.io/api/12345/store/

# Test with your actual DSN
curl https://o12345.ingest.sentry.io/api/12345/store/ \
  -X POST \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "X-Sentry-Auth: Sentry sentry_key=YOUR_PUBLIC_KEY, sentry_version=7" \
  -d '{"message":"test"}'

Source Map Upload Problems

Symptoms:

  • Stack traces showing minified code instead of original source
  • "Source code not found" errors in issue details
  • Upload commands failing with timeout or authentication errors
  • Releases created but source maps missing

Common errors:

# Upload timeout
Error: Request timeout after 30000ms

# Authentication failure
Error: HTTP 401 - Invalid auth token

# File size limits
Error: Source map exceeds maximum size of 40MB

# Missing release
Error: Release 'v1.2.3' does not exist for this project

Debugging source map uploads:

# Verify release exists
sentry-cli releases list --org your-org --project your-project

# Test source map upload
sentry-cli sourcemaps upload \
  --org your-org \
  --project your-project \
  --release v1.2.3 \
  ./dist \
  --debug

# Validate uploaded artifacts
sentry-cli releases files v1.2.3 list

Workaround during outages:

// Initialize Sentry with local source map resolution fallback
Sentry.init({
  dsn: 'YOUR_DSN',
  beforeSend(event) {
    // If source maps aren't resolving, add local context
    if (event.exception) {
      event.extra = event.extra || {};
      event.extra.localStack = new Error().stack;
    }
    return event;
  }
});

Alert Delivery Issues

Indicators:

  • Issue alerts not arriving in email or Slack
  • Delay between issue creation and notification (normally <30 seconds)
  • "Alert rules failed" notifications in Sentry
  • Integration status showing "error" or "disabled"

What causes alert failures:

  • Sentry's notification service degraded
  • Integration webhooks timing out (Slack, PagerDuty, Jira)
  • Email delivery service issues
  • Rate limiting on alert rules (too many alerts triggering)
  • Misconfigured alert rules after UI changes

Check alert rule health:

// Trigger a test alert programmatically
Sentry.captureException(new Error('ALERT TEST - IGNORE'), {
  tags: {
    alertTest: true,
    severity: 'high'
  },
  fingerprint: ['alert-test', Date.now().toString()]
});

Then verify the alert arrives through all configured channels. If events appear in Sentry but alerts don't fire, the issue is with the notification pipeline, not ingestion.

Integration Failures (Slack, Jira, GitHub)

Slack integration problems:

  • Messages not posting to configured channels
  • "Could not connect to Slack" errors in Sentry
  • Slack app authorization expired
  • Bot removed from channels

Jira integration problems:

  • "Create Jira Issue" button failing
  • Issues created but not linked to Sentry
  • Status sync broken between Sentry and Jira
  • Authentication token expired

GitHub integration problems:

  • Commits not linking to Sentry issues
  • Release tracking not working
  • "Suspect commits" feature showing no data
  • Webhook delivery failures

Diagnose integration issues:

# Check integration status via API
curl https://sentry.io/api/0/organizations/YOUR_ORG/integrations/ \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_AUTH_TOKEN"

# Test webhook delivery (GitHub)
# In GitHub: Settings → Webhooks → Recent Deliveries
# Check for 2xx responses from Sentry

# Test Slack webhook
curl -X POST YOUR_SENTRY_SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"text":"Test message from Sentry integration check"}'

The Real Impact When Sentry Goes Down

Error Visibility Blind Spots

When Sentry is down or degraded, you lose critical visibility into production issues:

  • Silent failures: Exceptions happening but not being captured
  • No error trend data: Unable to see if error rates are spiking
  • Missing context: New errors lacking breadcrumbs and user data
  • Incomplete issue resolution: Can't track if fixes actually worked

For a busy application throwing 10,000 errors per hour, even a 30-minute Sentry outage means 5,000 unreported issues—any of which could be user-impacting bugs or security vulnerabilities.

Debugging Delays and Production Blind Spots

Modern development teams rely on Sentry for rapid incident response:

  • Mean time to detection (MTTD) increases: Teams don't know about issues until users report them
  • Mean time to resolution (MTTR) extends: Without stack traces, debugging takes 5-10x longer
  • Release confidence drops: Can't verify new deploys aren't introducing errors
  • Rollback decisions delayed: No data to inform whether to revert changes

Real-world example: A critical payment processing bug might normally be detected in 2 minutes via Sentry alerts. During a Sentry outage, it could go unnoticed for 30+ minutes until customers complain, resulting in:

  • Hundreds of failed transactions
  • Emergency rollback without proper diagnosis
  • Extended debugging session without error context
  • Customer trust impact and support ticket surge

Release Monitoring Gaps

Sentry's release tracking provides crucial deploy health data:

  • Can't monitor deploy health: No visibility into whether new releases increase error rates
  • Suspect commit identification broken: Unable to automatically identify which commit introduced bugs
  • Release comparison unavailable: Can't compare error patterns between versions
  • Version tracking lost: Hard to correlate user reports with specific releases

This makes continuous deployment risky—teams lose confidence in shipping frequently if they can't immediately detect regressions.

On-Call Noise and False Escalations

When Sentry degrades but doesn't completely fail:

  • Alert storms: Backed-up events suddenly flood in after recovery
  • Duplicate alerts: Retry logic triggers multiple notifications for the same issue
  • Threshold breaches: Delayed events cause anomalous spike alerts
  • False positives: On-call engineers paged for issues that already resolved

Post-outage alert storm:

// Protect against alert storms after Sentry recovers
Sentry.init({
  dsn: 'YOUR_DSN',
  beforeSend(event, hint) {
    // Rate limit events during recovery periods
    const now = Date.now();
    if (sentryRecovering && now - lastSentryOutage < 300000) { // 5 minutes
      // Sample events more aggressively
      if (Math.random() > 0.1) return null; // Keep only 10%
    }
    return event;
  }
});

Performance Monitoring Blackout

For teams using Sentry Performance Monitoring:

  • Transaction traces missing: Can't diagnose slow endpoints
  • No apdex scores: Unable to track user experience metrics
  • Database query insights lost: Performance optimization work halted
  • Frontend performance blind: Can't detect web vital degradations

A 2-hour Sentry Performance outage means losing performance data during your peak traffic period—potentially missing critical performance regressions.

What to Do When Sentry Goes Down

1. Implement SDK Initialization with Fallbacks

Build resilience into your Sentry configuration:

// Advanced Sentry initialization with fallback and circuit breaker
let sentryOperational = true;
let failedRequests = 0;
const FAILURE_THRESHOLD = 5;

function initSentryWithFallback() {
  Sentry.init({
    dsn: process.env.SENTRY_DSN,
    environment: process.env.NODE_ENV,
    
    // Transport options for better resilience
    transport: Sentry.makeNodeTransport,
    transportOptions: {
      // Shorter timeout to fail fast
      timeout: 5000,
      
      // Keep events in memory if sending fails
      bufferSize: 100
    },
    
    beforeSend(event, hint) {
      // Circuit breaker: stop trying if Sentry is down
      if (!sentryOperational) {
        // Queue event locally instead
        localEventQueue.push(event);
        return null;
      }
      return event;
    },
    
    // Track transport errors
    integrations: [
      new Sentry.Integrations.OnUncaughtException({
        onFatalError: (err) => {
          if (err.message.includes('Sentry')) {
            failedRequests++;
            if (failedRequests >= FAILURE_THRESHOLD) {
              sentryOperational = false;
              console.warn('Sentry appears down, enabling fallback mode');
              setTimeout(() => {
                sentryOperational = true;
                failedRequests = 0;
                flushLocalEventQueue();
              }, 300000); // Retry after 5 minutes
            }
          }
        }
      })
    ]
  });
}

2. Offline Event Queuing

Store events locally when Sentry is unreachable:

const fs = require('fs').promises;
const path = require('path');

class SentryOfflineQueue {
  constructor(queuePath = './sentry-offline-queue') {
    this.queuePath = queuePath;
    this.maxQueueSize = 1000;
  }
  
  async queueEvent(event) {
    try {
      const filename = `${Date.now()}-${event.event_id}.json`;
      const filepath = path.join(this.queuePath, filename);
      await fs.mkdir(this.queuePath, { recursive: true });
      await fs.writeFile(filepath, JSON.stringify(event));
      
      // Clean up old events if queue is too large
      await this.pruneQueue();
    } catch (error) {
      console.error('Failed to queue event offline:', error);
    }
  }
  
  async flushQueue() {
    try {
      const files = await fs.readdir(this.queuePath);
      
      for (const file of files.slice(0, 50)) { // Batch process
        const filepath = path.join(this.queuePath, file);
        const eventData = await fs.readFile(filepath, 'utf8');
        const event = JSON.parse(eventData);
        
        try {
          await Sentry.captureEvent(event);
          await fs.unlink(filepath);
        } catch (error) {
          // Sentry still down, keep event queued
          break;
        }
      }
    } catch (error) {
      console.error('Failed to flush offline queue:', error);
    }
  }
  
  async pruneQueue() {
    const files = await fs.readdir(this.queuePath);
    if (files.length > this.maxQueueSize) {
      // Delete oldest files
      const sorted = files.sort();
      for (const file of sorted.slice(0, files.length - this.maxQueueSize)) {
        await fs.unlink(path.join(this.queuePath, file));
      }
    }
  }
}

const offlineQueue = new SentryOfflineQueue();

// Periodically try to flush queue
setInterval(() => offlineQueue.flushQueue(), 60000);

3. Multi-DSN Routing Strategy

For enterprise applications, route to multiple Sentry projects or even different error monitoring services:

class MultiDestinationErrorReporter {
  constructor() {
    this.primary = Sentry;
    this.fallback = null; // Could be Rollbar, Bugsnag, etc.
    this.localLog = [];
  }
  
  async captureException(error, context = {}) {
    const event = {
      error,
      context,
      timestamp: Date.now(),
      environment: process.env.NODE_ENV
    };
    
    // Try primary (Sentry)
    try {
      const eventId = this.primary.captureException(error, context);
      if (eventId) return eventId;
    } catch (err) {
      console.warn('Primary error reporter failed:', err.message);
    }
    
    // Try fallback service
    if (this.fallback) {
      try {
        return await this.fallback.report(error, context);
      } catch (err) {
        console.warn('Fallback error reporter failed:', err.message);
      }
    }
    
    // Last resort: local logging
    this.localLog.push(event);
    await fs.appendFile(
      './error-log.jsonl',
      JSON.stringify(event) + '\n'
    );
    
    return null;
  }
  
  async flush() {
    // Attempt to send locally logged errors when service recovers
    for (const event of this.localLog) {
      try {
        await this.primary.captureException(event.error, event.context);
      } catch (err) {
        break; // Still down
      }
    }
    this.localLog = [];
  }
}

const errorReporter = new MultiDestinationErrorReporter();

// Use throughout application
try {
  riskyOperation();
} catch (error) {
  await errorReporter.captureException(error, {
    tags: { module: 'payments' }
  });
}

4. Health Check Endpoints

Implement comprehensive Sentry health monitoring:

// Express.js health check with detailed diagnostics
app.get('/health/error-tracking', async (req, res) => {
  const health = {
    status: 'unknown',
    checks: {
      sentryConnectivity: 'unknown',
      eventIngestion: 'unknown',
      sourceMapResolution: 'unknown',
      alertDelivery: 'unknown'
    },
    lastSuccessfulEvent: null,
    queuedEvents: 0
  };
  
  // Test 1: Connectivity
  try {
    const startTime = Date.now();
    const testEventId = Sentry.captureMessage('Health check', {
      level: 'info',
      tags: { healthCheck: true }
    });
    
    if (testEventId) {
      health.checks.sentryConnectivity = 'healthy';
      health.checks.eventIngestion = 'healthy';
      health.lastSuccessfulEvent = new Date().toISOString();
    }
  } catch (error) {
    health.checks.sentryConnectivity = 'unhealthy';
    health.checks.eventIngestion = 'unhealthy';
  }
  
  // Test 2: Check offline queue size
  try {
    health.queuedEvents = await offlineQueue.getQueueSize();
    if (health.queuedEvents > 100) {
      health.checks.eventIngestion = 'degraded';
    }
  } catch (error) {
    // Queue check failed
  }
  
  // Determine overall status
  const checks = Object.values(health.checks);
  if (checks.every(c => c === 'healthy')) {
    health.status = 'healthy';
    res.json(health);
  } else if (checks.some(c => c === 'unhealthy')) {
    health.status = 'unhealthy';
    res.status(503).json(health);
  } else {
    health.status = 'degraded';
    res.status(200).json(health);
  }
});

5. Set Up Comprehensive Monitoring and Alerts

Monitor Sentry's operational status proactively:

// Automated Sentry health monitoring
const cron = require('node-cron');
const axios = require('axios');

class SentryHealthMonitor {
  constructor() {
    this.consecutiveFailures = 0;
    this.alertThreshold = 3;
    this.checkInterval = '*/5 * * * *'; // Every 5 minutes
  }
  
  async checkHealth() {
    try {
      // Check official status API
      const statusResponse = await axios.get('https://status.sentry.io/api/v2/status.json');
      const { indicator } = statusResponse.data.status;
      
      if (indicator !== 'none') {
        await this.sendAlert(`Sentry status page reports: ${indicator}`);
      }
      
      // Check actual ingestion
      const testEventId = Sentry.captureMessage('Health monitor test');
      if (!testEventId) {
        this.consecutiveFailures++;
      } else {
        this.consecutiveFailures = 0;
      }
      
      if (this.consecutiveFailures >= this.alertThreshold) {
        await this.sendAlert(`Sentry event ingestion failing (${this.consecutiveFailures} consecutive failures)`);
      }
      
    } catch (error) {
      this.consecutiveFailures++;
      console.error('Sentry health check failed:', error.message);
    }
  }
  
  async sendAlert(message) {
    // Send to PagerDuty, Slack, etc.
    await fetch(process.env.SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL, {
      method: 'POST',
      headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
      body: JSON.stringify({
        text: `🚨 Sentry Health Alert: ${message}`,
        channel: '#engineering-alerts'
      })
    });
  }
  
  start() {
    cron.schedule(this.checkInterval, () => this.checkHealth());
    console.log('Sentry health monitoring started');
  }
}

const monitor = new SentryHealthMonitor();
monitor.start();

6. Alternative Logging Strategy

Maintain a fallback logging mechanism:

// Winston logger as Sentry backup
const winston = require('winston');

const fallbackLogger = winston.createLogger({
  level: 'error',
  format: winston.format.json(),
  transports: [
    new winston.transports.File({ 
      filename: 'error-fallback.log',
      maxsize: 10485760, // 10MB
      maxFiles: 5
    })
  ]
});

// Wrapper that tries Sentry first, falls back to Winston
function logError(error, context = {}) {
  try {
    Sentry.captureException(error, { extra: context });
  } catch (sentryError) {
    // Sentry failed, use fallback
    fallbackLogger.error({
      message: error.message,
      stack: error.stack,
      context,
      timestamp: new Date().toISOString()
    });
  }
}

Related Error Monitoring Resources

When Sentry is down, you may need alternative monitoring solutions:

Frequently Asked Questions

How often does Sentry go down?

Sentry maintains strong uptime, typically exceeding 99.9% availability. Major outages affecting all customers are rare (2-4 times per year), though regional issues or specific component degradations (like source map uploads or alert delivery) occur more frequently. Self-hosted Sentry instances have different reliability characteristics depending on infrastructure.

What's the difference between Sentry SaaS and self-hosted reliability?

Sentry SaaS (sentry.io) benefits from professional operations, redundant infrastructure, and 24/7 monitoring, but you're dependent on their uptime. Self-hosted Sentry gives you control but requires you to manage infrastructure, scaling, and reliability. Self-hosted instances can continue operating during Sentry SaaS outages but require DevOps expertise to maintain.

Can I monitor multiple error tracking services simultaneously?

Yes, many teams implement multi-service strategies for critical applications. You can send errors to both Sentry and alternatives like Rollbar, Bugsnag, or Datadog Error Tracking. The tradeoff is additional cost and complexity in managing multiple dashboards. Use feature flags to toggle between services during outages.

How do I prevent losing errors during Sentry outages?

Implement offline queuing in your application (see code examples above). When Sentry is unreachable, store events in-memory, on-disk, or in a local database, then flush them when connectivity resumes. Set a maximum queue size to prevent memory issues and implement sampling if the queue grows too large.

Should I cache source maps locally to avoid Sentry upload failures?

Yes, keeping local copies of source maps is best practice. Store them in your build artifacts or a separate storage service (S3, GCS). During Sentry outages, you can manually upload source maps later or use them for local debugging. Implement retries with exponential backoff for source map uploads during CI/CD.

What's the best way to test if Sentry is working in production?

Implement a synthetic monitoring endpoint that periodically sends test events and verifies they appear in your Sentry dashboard. Check both event ingestion and alert delivery. Run these checks every 5-15 minutes and alert if consecutive failures occur. Avoid spamming your issue stream by using appropriate tags and issue grouping.

How do I handle Sentry alert storms after an outage?

Configure alert rate limiting in Sentry's alert rules to prevent notification floods. In your application, implement sampling during recovery periods (first 10 minutes after detecting Sentry is back online). Use the beforeSend hook to reduce event volume temporarily. Consider disabling automatic alerts for lower-severity issues during recovery.

Can Sentry performance monitoring work independently of error tracking?

Sentry Performance Monitoring and Error Tracking share the same ingestion pipeline, so outages typically affect both. However, you can configure separate DSNs for errors vs. transactions and prioritize error event sending if needed. Performance data is generally less critical than error data for immediate incident response.

What are the signs Sentry is degraded but not completely down?

Look for: increased event processing latency (events taking 5+ minutes to appear), intermittent API timeouts, partial data in issue details (missing breadcrumbs or context), source maps not resolving consistently, or alert delivery delays. These indicate backend processing issues rather than complete service failure.

How should I communicate with my team during a Sentry outage?

Post in your team chat immediately when you confirm Sentry is down, noting the scope (full outage vs. specific features). Share alternative debugging resources (application logs, APM tools). Increase monitoring alerting through other channels. After recovery, review queued events for critical issues that occurred during the outage.

Stay Ahead of Sentry Outages

Don't let error monitoring gaps leave you flying blind. Subscribe to real-time Sentry alerts and get notified instantly when issues are detected—before production errors go unnoticed.

API Status Check monitors Sentry 24/7 with:

  • 60-second health checks for event ingestion pipeline
  • Instant alerts via email, Slack, Discord, or webhook
  • Historical uptime tracking and incident reports
  • Multi-service monitoring for your entire observability stack

Start monitoring Sentry now →

Last updated: February 4, 2026. Sentry status information is provided in real-time based on active monitoring. For official incident reports, always refer to status.sentry.io.

Monitor Your APIs

Check the real-time status of 100+ popular APIs used by developers.

View API Status →