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App Monitoring Toolmaker Sentry Acquires Code Coverage Provider Codecov

• By John K. Waters
• December 1, 2022

Software development teams are under a lot of pressure these days to ship code faster— secure, reliable code. Admittedly, "fast but good" is an age-old challenge for devs of nearly every stripe, but given the precipitous rise in code complexity, the pressure has been building. But the acquisition of Codecov by Sentry, announced today, may offer hard-working devs a release valve.

Sentry is a leading provider of what it calls "developer-first application monitoring." Its self-hosted and cloud-based application monitoring tools are designed to help software teams "see clearer, solve quicker, and learn continuously," the company says. Codecov makes a dedicated code coverage solution currently used by dev teams as some marquee operations, including Lyft, Slack, The Washington Post, and GoodRx, among others.

The acquisition expands Sentry's product offering, giving dev teams a tool for improving code quality and velocity earlier in the development life cycle, and helping to accelerate remediation.

Similar to Sentry, Codecov works within developers' existing workflows for software development, providing feedback, insight, and ownership over the quality of the code, regardless of platform, language, or CI/CD tooling. With the acquisition, Sentry customers will have access to insights and protection over their code quality, both pre- and post-deployment, the company says. 

"Our mission has always been to empower developers to ship high quality code faster than anyone else through context and insights, versus dashboards and tools that frankly weren't built for resolution," said Milin Desai, CEO of Sentry, in a statement. "The Codecov team shares this singular focus [and the acquisition] enables us to offer developers even more comprehensive insight into their application's code quality earlier in the development cycle."

Codecov's team, including co-founders Jerrod Engelberg and Eli Hooten, will join the Sentry team, according to the announcement.

"There's an obvious alignment between Sentry and Codecov in how we empower developers to feel confident in making and shipping changes," said Engelberg in a statement. "We are climbing the same summit of software reliability from opposite sides, and with this, our customers new and old will experience faster development cycles, quicker discovery and remediation of bugs, and an overall better developer experience."

Codecov began as a code coverage reporting tool in 2014 and has since emerged as a market leader in the test analytics space. The company makes coverage actionable for more two dozen test frameworks, and has been used by more than a million software developers to improve their approach to testing, coverage, and code reliability.

Sentry started out as an open-source project. The original goal of the company's founders was to solve their own problems with an easy way to fix their mistakes. Ten years later, that two-person passion project has grown into one of the world’s leading error-tracking platform with more than 200 employees in four offices worldwide. Sentry currently supports more than 30 coding languages.

Jun Li, a staff software engineer at Lyft, weighed in on the acquisition. "Codecov provides a source of truth for our teams, Li said. "It reduces friction, as it is flexible enough to fit into any language and CI/CD, so engineers can see the impact and dig deeper into code changes all in one place. The implementation of Codecov has improved the overall developer experience and we're seeing more and more adoption of it across our teams."