AWS X-Ray vs Sentry Performance

AWS X-Ray is a cloud service for collecting and examining application request traces. A trace can show request and response details alongside calls to downstream AWS resources, microservices, databases and web APIs. X-Ray also uses trace data to map clients, front-end services and backend services, helping identify bottlenecks and latency spikes.

Applications can send traces through X-Ray SDKs or APIs, AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry, or CloudWatch Application Signals. AWS integrations can add tracing headers, transmit data, run the daemon or instrument requests. For Lambda, the daemon can record invocation details, while the SDK can trace outgoing calls and add annotations and metadata. The SDK samples requests by default, with configurable sampling rules. Trace data is retained for 30 days and encrypted at rest; AWS Identity and Access Management controls access. X-Ray has a free allowance of 100,000 traces recorded and the first 1,000,000 traces retrieved or scanned per month; additional usage is billed by usage. Beginning February 25, 2026, AWS limits X-Ray SDK and daemon releases to security fixes and recommends migration to OpenTelemetry.

Sentry Performance is an application performance monitoring service for developers diagnosing bottlenecks in applications and distributed systems. It links performance problems with related errors, transactions, and code details to help teams assess user impact and investigate issues. Trace views and code context can help locate slow database queries, API calls, and associated code lines. Distributed tracing follows requests across services to help identify where latency or errors arise. Teams can prioritize performance issues by user impact and create custom metrics and alerts. Sentry lists integrations with GitHub, Jira, Slack, GitLab, Linear, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, Datadog, and Vercel, and supports OpenTelemetry. Its cloud service is hosted on Google Cloud Platform with a multi-tenant architecture; a self-hosted option is available for teams that need data in their own infrastructure. Trace retention is 90 days. The Developer plan costs nothing and has monthly usage quotas. Paid plans start at $26/mo; a free trial is available for Business, but not Team. Sentry makes its SOC 2 Type 2 report and ISO 27001 certificate available through user accounts or by request.