For more information, see our documentation.
Spotlight is Sentry for Development. Debuggability elevated. Spotlight brings rich observability into development environments by leveraging the power of Sentry's SDKs, giving you real-time insights into errors, performance, and logs—essential for modern development and AI-assisted coding workflows.
- View real-time errors, traces, logs, and performance data from your applications
- Monitor multiple projects simultaneously in one place
- Stream and tail events with various output formats (human, logfmt, json, markdown)
- Run commands with automatic Spotlight integration
- Integrate with AI coding assistants via MCP server, giving AI tools direct access to your application's telemetry for smarter debugging and development
Spotlight offers two main ways to work with your development telemetry:
Electron App (macOS): Download the standalone desktop application for a native experience.
CLI (npx @spotlightjs/spotlight): Run the command-line tool with multiple modes:
- Default mode starts a web UI server for viewing telemetry in your browser
spotlight tail [types...]- stream events (errors, traces, logs, attachments) to your terminal with multiple formattersspotlight run <command>- run your application with Spotlight automatically configuredspotlight mcp- start the MCP server for AI tool integration (stdio + HTTP)
Spotlight uses Sentry SDKs to capture telemetry data and sends it to the Sidecar, a local proxy server running on your machine. The Sidecar processes these events and forwards them to the UI, where you can view everything in real-time via the web interface or stream output to your terminal. Spotlight works standalone or alongside your existing Sentry setup without interference.
