Open Source Home

This is the home for Sentry Software[1]'s open-source projects, all hosted on GitHub[2]: the directory of repositories[3], how to contribute[4], etc.

Notable Internal Projects

MetricsHub

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The most significant open-source project that Sentry Software is working on is MetricsHub[5]. MetricsHub is a universal metrics collection agent for OpenTelemetry. This solution is designed to be extensible, and we hope to build a community around it so that all users can benefit from the extensions made by others.

This is the first time we are publishing an entire software solution in open source. The main challenge has been to migrate a significant part of internal libraries from closed source to open source: various protocol clients, Maven plugins, etc. Ensuring that the entire project can build on GitHub or anyone's system took us a considerable amount of time, but we're proud of the result!

The MetricsHub project consists of three main repositories:

Sentry Maven Skin

The Sentry Maven Skin[9] is a skin used when building a documentation site with Maven[10]. This skin provides a stylish design, an excellent Lighthouse score, and features not available in other Maven skins. This site is, in fact, built with Maven and the Sentry Maven Skin!

Screenshot of an example Maven project using the Sentry Maven Skin to build its site.

The initial internal versions of this skin did not fulfill all the requirements of standard Maven skins (like customizing the logo, links, etc.). Open-sourcing this project forced us to comply with all requirements so that anyone could use this (very nice) skin to build the site of their Maven project.

Java Libraries

While working on open-sourcing MetricsHub[5], we first had to publish a collection of Java libraries to handle various instrumentation protocols and operations, notably:

  • ipmi[11], a Java library to connect to IPMI (forked from Verax Systems[12]).
  • winrm[13], a Java library to execute commands or WMI queries on a remote Windows system through WinRM.
  • wbem[14], a Java library to perform WBEM operations.
  • wmi[15], a Java library to execute commands or WMI queries on a remote Windows system, through WMI (on Windows only).

Sentry Contributions to Other Projects

Before open-sourcing our own products, we contributed to third-party open-source projects that we were relying on (and we keep contributing!):

A special project we've contributed to is Jawk[22], a Java implementation of the famous AWK[23] parsing utility. We've forked the original project, and we now maintain our own version, much lighter and faster. We will try to be as compatible as possible with GNU AWK (gawk)[24].

Why Open Source

For 20+ years, Sentry Software[1] has been developing proprietary software for a proprietary ecosystem. A few years ago, however, we started collaborating with open-source projects that our own products relied on:

  • Raising issues we encountered;
  • Documenting existing features;
  • Fixing bugs;
  • Adding features we needed.

And then we realized that if we wanted to fully collaborate with important open-source projects, like OpenTelemetry[25], or with the Green Software Foundation[26], we needed to go open source ourselves!

The benefits of open-source software are multiple for end-users as well, as it guarantees our customers that our software products remain open, secure, and will even last long after us!

Contributing to Sentry Repositories

Please carefully follow some basic rules we've established[27] to ensure a healthy collaboration between different people, and refer to the contributor's guide[4] to ensure you don't waste your time while trying to help!

Licenses

Our open-source projects are released under various licenses, depending on the project's requirements, how it's supposed to be used, and its history. Please refer to the licenses page[28] for more details. Check each repository documentation site[3] for specific information about each repository.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the Apache Software Foundation[29] for leading the way into open source. They truly inspired us!

Thank you to the Cloud-Native Software Foundation[30] for incubating and nurturing the OpenTelemetry project[31].

Thank you to the Linux Foundation[32] for hosting the Green Software Foundation[26]. Sentry Software is a member of both the Linux Foundation[33] and the Green Software Foundation[34].

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