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Investigating an issue with Sentinel

Sentinel investigates every issue to determine a likely cause.

Screenshot of the Sentinel issue inbox

Triggering an investigation

When you install Sentinel it will investigate the 50 most recent issues in your top project.

Click on the "Investigate" button on any other issue in your backlog to trigger a Sentinel investigation.

Any new issues will automatically be investigated as they appear.

Investigation States, Statuses, and Severities

Sentinel will assign an issue a Investigation Status, a Triage State, and a Severity.

The Investigation Status refers to the progress of Sentinel's investigation. Sentinel's investigation statuses include:

  • New: Sentinel has not yet investigated the issue
  • Investigating: Sentinel is actively investigating the issue
  • Fixing: Sentinel is actively implementing a fix for the issue.
  • Pull Request Closed: Sentinel has opened a PR that has been merged or closed.
  • Pull Request Open: There is a currently open PR from Sentinel for the issue.
  • Resolved: The issue has been solved and resolved in Sentry.
  • Triaged: Sentinel has completed its investigation and assigned the issue a triage status, but does not have a specific fix for the issue.
  • Solutions Proposed: Sentinel has proposed one or more solutions to fix the issue.

The Triage Status refers to how Sentinel interprets the issue and what it believes should be done with the issue. Triage statuses include:

  • Environment problem: An issue related to an environment set up for a user or a system.
  • Intended behavior: An error that has been logged, but is correctly being handled within an application
  • Ignorable: An issue that does not require any action or fix.
  • Needs Info: An issue where Sentinel requires additional information it does not currently have access to.
  • Needs Guidance: An issue where there are multiple potential paths to address, which require a product/business decision to be made.
  • Obfuscated: An issue where Sentinel cannot interpret the stack trace in order to complete an investigation.
  • Solvable: An issue with a potential solution.
  • Transient: A temporary issue that does not require a direct fix.

Issue Severity refers to the impact and importance of the issue and cause. Severity is bucketed into:

  • Low
  • Medium
  • High
  • Critical

You can filter your Issues Inbox on any Investigation Status, Triage Status, or Severity to narrow in on just those issues.

Investigation Details

To see a deeper analysis of an investigation you can click into the issue details page.

Screenshot of a Sentinel issue detail

For every investigated issue, Sentinel will provide a summary explanation of the issue along with what it thinks is the most relevant piece of code.

The main section of the Sentinel investigation is its hypothesis generation where it will look at one or more potential hypotheses around what is causing the issue.

Screenshot of a Sentinel issue hypothesis

For each hypothesis, Sentinel provides an explanation of the hypothesis, a list of evidence that it has put together to support or refute the hypothesis, and an evalutation about whether or not that hypothesis is likely.

It then ranks the hypotheses it looked at from most to least likely.

If the issue is Solvable, then Sentinel will propose solutions for that most likely hypothesis.

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