The bug track­ing space has been gen­er­at­ing a good deal of inter­est since Twit­ter acquired mobile crash-report­ing tool Crash­lyt­ics in Jan­u­ary – and error-track­ing start­up Sen­try is poised to take full advan­tage with the launch of a huge­ly revamped platform.

Since its ear­ly days a few years ago as an inter­nal excep­tion-log­ging tool for Djan­go apps at Dis­qus, its cre­ators (design­er Chris Jen­nings and engi­neer David Cramer) have seen it blos­som impres­sive­ly. In devel­op­ments which will stir the admi­ra­tion of many a busi­ness devel­op­ment asso­ciate, chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer and chief rev­enue offi­cer, Jen­ner and Cramer (who both still work for Dis­qus) decid­ed to open-source their project a cou­ple of years ago because the firm was find­ing it so useful.

Grow­ing to profitability

Around 50 oth­er devel­op­ers have now con­tributed at least one line of code (just take a look at Sentry’s GitHub page) and the tool now sup­ports a pletho­ra of pop­u­lar lan­guages, includ­ing JavaScript, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby and Node.js.  And it’s def­i­nite­ly mak­ing mon­ey: its founders are more than hap­py with its 10 per cent month­ly growth rate and have no plans to raise any exter­nal fund­ing for the fore­see­able future.

The open source ver­sion gave way to a host­ed plat­form last year, main­ly because the cost entailed in the main­te­nance and upkeep of its own serv­er was becom­ing imprac­ti­cal with so many users turn­ing to Sen­try to mon­i­tor errors. The host­ed ver­sion now claims over 500 pay­ing cus­tomers and it’s been adopt­ed by some promi­nent star­tups and big tech firms, includ­ing Mozil­la, Pin­ter­est, Rdio and Path.

And traf­fic is on the rise, leap­ing by 10 per cent since the Crash­lyt­ics acquisition.

The revamp and future plans

The relaunch fea­tures an improved design and user inter­face, offer­ing bet­ter nav­i­ga­tion as well as addi­tion­al inte­gra­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion options.  Projects can be man­aged from a dash­board-like hub called “teams” and the tool now works with Bit­Bucketn Camp­fire, GitHub, Grove.io, IRC, JIRA, Piv­otal Track­er, Trel­lo and Sprint.ly.

Plans are also under­way to move beyond bug track­ing: the founders have valu­able data about which users are hit­ting the errors in the var­i­ous apps. Jen­nings explains:

“We’ve recent­ly start­ed play­ing with ser­vic­ing this infor­ma­tion. Soon, we’re going to start track­ing and pre­sent­ing actu­al users, and giv­ing you tools to recov­er these bad users’ experiences.”