Sentry

Sentry is an open-source bugtracker. Read more at https://sentry.io/.

Send GDPR-compliant user data

When gathering data on a crash, the current user can be of major importance. Sentry offers a simple way of sending all user-related data to your Sentry instance. Unfortunately, this collides with GDPR because IP and email address are sensitive data. Luckily, the internal user id is not.

So if you are using the default django authentication process, you can easily set up Sentry, so you get the user id in your error reports but nothing else (what might conflict with GDPR).

Sentry client

Install the latest sentry-sdk client from pypi:

pip install -U sentry-sdk

Or for django integration:

pip install --upgrade 'sentry-sdk[django]'

For more information please read the official documentation on Sentry’s Django integration.

Settings

There are a hand full important settings to be aware of when using Sentry:

• send_default_pii

• event_scrubber

• before_send

• before_send_transaction

• request_bodies

In order to send GDPR conform data to Sentry adjust the settings in the main settings.py as follows:

from ambient_toolbox.sentry.helpers import SentryEventScrubber

sentry_sdk.init(
    ...
    send_default_pii=True,
    before_send=SentryEventScrubber().scrub_sensitive_data_from_sentry_event,
    before_send_transaction=SentryEventScrubber().scrub_sensitive_data_from_sentry_event,
)

The send_default_pii attaches some additional information to the event. If turned on the default event_scrubber will not run automatically therefore the before_send and before_send_transaction hook have to be set to remove all sensitive data. One way to remove the data is to use the SentryEventScrubber. It will remove all sensitive data from the event, no matter if it is part of the user data or in the stacktrace. It is also possible to specify more keys to be removed from the event by passing in a denylist with a list of names.

There is also a more lightweight way of removing sensitive data that will only remove data on the user object and therefore might miss sensitive data within e.g. the stacktrace, on the other hand it offers more context on the event. To use this lightweight event scrubber use the following settings instead:

from ambient_toolbox.sentry.helpers import strip_sensitive_data_from_sentry_event

sentry_sdk.init(
    ...
    send_default_pii=True,
    before_send=strip_sensitive_data_from_sentry_event,
    before_send_transaction=strip_sensitive_data_from_sentry_event,
)

And that’s it! Have fun finding your bugs more easily!