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Spotlight
by Sentry

About Spotlight

Spotlight started out as a Hackweek project at Sentry:

Spotlight is Sentry for Development. Inspired by an old project, Django Debug Toolbar, Spotlight brings a rich debug overlay into development environments, and it does it by leveraging the existing power of Sentry’s SDKs

You get the power of Sentry’s telemetry (through its SDKs) without needing Sentry’s production monitoring. If you already use Sentry, that’s great. All you need is enabling Spotlight in your SDK and run Spotlight locally. If you are not using Sentry, you need to install the free and open source Sentry SDKs to get started. If you want to use Sentry later on, this saves you the initial setup. Just add your Sentry DSNs into your projects and off you go!

Three Ways to Use Spotlight

Spotlight provides three powerful tools for debugging and development:

1. Local Development Tool

A real-time debugging overlay that displays errors, traces, logs, and profiles directly in your browser or dedicated desktop app. See everything happening in your application as it happens.

Perfect for:

  • Visual debugging during development
  • Inspecting distributed traces
  • Monitoring application performance
  • Viewing real-time logs and errors

2. MCP Server

Model Context Protocol integration that connects Spotlight to AI coding assistants like Cursor, Claude, and other MCP clients. Your AI assistant can access your application’s runtime data to help debug issues.

Perfect for:

  • AI-assisted debugging
  • Letting your coding assistant analyze errors
  • Getting context-aware code suggestions based on runtime data
  • Automated error investigation

3. CLI (Command Line Interface)

Run your applications with Spotlight’s CLI to automatically capture telemetry data, or tail events in real-time from your terminal.

Perfect for:

  • Running backend services with automatic instrumentation
  • Streaming logs and traces to your terminal
  • CI/CD integration
  • Headless environments

Why Spotlight?

Spotlight provides comprehensive debugging visibility:

  • Errors with full stack traces
  • Traces including distributed transactions
  • Logs with structured data
  • Profiling data for performance analysis
  • Configuration and dependency information
  • Customizable with your own integrations

Spotlight vs Sentry

SpotlightSentry
Where it runsLocal on your machineCloud or self-hosted
Data displayReal-time, shows everythingAggregated, sampled
CostFree and open sourceCommercial (with free tier)
Use caseActive developmentProduction monitoring

Get Started

Choose the approach that fits your workflow:

Desktop App Download the standalone app with built-in UI
CLI Tools Run your apps with Spotlight or tail events
MCP Server Connect to AI coding assistants
Sidecar Integration Integrate into your build process

Quick Start

If you are already using Sentry SDKs in your application try the following:

  1. Set SENTRY_SPOTLIGHT=1 in your env1
  2. Run npx @spotlightjs/spotlight2
  3. Run your application
  4. Go to http://localhost:8969
  5. Observe the traces and errors coming to your local Spotlight instance

Footnotes

  1. Currently Python, Ruby, PHP, and all JS-based SDKs support this env variable. If your choice of SDK doesn’t support it, you can still use Spotlight by enabling the spotlight option in its init configuration. Also you can let us know of your interest and we’ll add support for the env variable. ↩

  2. If you don’t have npx around, you can use docker run -p 8969 ghcr.io/getsentry/spotlight:latest, or head over to our GitHub Releases page and download a binary for your system. Alternatively, we provide an Electron-based application that can be used to run the Sidecar as well as a dedicated instance of the overlay. There are some limitations to this method, but it is particularly useful for headless or mobile environments.

    latest version: 2.3.0
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