Empower Plant — Fleet Control Center

A modern, cross-platform demo for sentry-native, the Sentry SDK for native (C/C++) applications.

It is a desktop control center for a fictional fleet of Empower Plant IoT devices: a GPU-rendered dashboard with live telemetry, background pipelines, a real backend integration, and a Chaos Lab that triggers a curated taxonomy of crashes, hangs and errors — each instrumented with breadcrumbs, spans, tags, contexts and attachments so the resulting Sentry issue is fully debuggable (and a great showcase for Seer's root-cause analysis).

It runs on Linux, macOS and Windows and uses the new out-of-process native crash backend (no Breakpad, Crashpad or in-process handler).

Quick start

Prerequisites

All platforms need a C++17 compiler, CMake ≥ 3.16, and Git. Everything else — the Sentry SDK, GLFW, Dear ImGui, the Rubik and Font Awesome fonts, and stb — is fetched automatically by CMake on first configure (so the first build needs network access).

OS	Install
Linux (Debian/Ubuntu)	sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake git xorg-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev
macOS	xcode-select --install and brew install cmake (uses the system OpenGL and libcurl)
Windows	Visual Studio 2022 with the Desktop development with C++ workload, plus CMake and Git. CMake's default generator finds MSVC — no extra setup.

Build & run

Linux / macOS — a convenience Makefile wraps CMake:

export SENTRY_DSN="https://<key>@<org>.ingest.sentry.io/<project>"
make run            # builds, then launches the GUI

Or drive CMake directly:

cmake -B build -S . -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DEMPOWER_BUILD_GUI=ON
cmake --build build --parallel
./build/empower-fleet

Windows (Developer Command Prompt or PowerShell):

cmake -B build -S . -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DEMPOWER_BUILD_GUI=ON
cmake --build build --config RelWithDebInfo --parallel
set SENTRY_DSN=https://<key>@<org>.ingest.sentry.io/<project>
build\empower-fleet.exe

Without a SENTRY_DSN the app still runs, but events are dropped instead of being sent. Open the Chaos Lab tab and trigger any fault — the Convoluted Chain is the headline scenario for Seer.

The build produces three binaries (each with the sentry-crash daemon copied next to it):

• empower-fleet — the GUI Fleet Control Center
• empower-headless — headless autopilot / remote command listener (used by CI)
• empower-smoke — a connectivity smoke test

On macOS the binaries are ad-hoc codesigned at build time with the get-task-allow entitlement (cmake/get-task-allow.entitlements) so the crash daemon can capture full minidumps.

What it demonstrates

Area	Detail
Crash reporting	New native backend with out-of-process minidump daemon + client-side stackwalk, async upload
Crash taxonomy	Null deref, use-after-free (cross-thread), stack overflow, divide-by-zero, heap corruption, abort, GPU device-lost, app-hang, and a convoluted chain (corruption now, crash later, far away)
Performance	Transactions and child spans around pipelines and backend calls
Distributed tracing	sentry-trace / baggage propagation to the shared Empower Plant Flask backend
Structured logs	sentry_log_*, streamed live on the Telemetry page
Metrics	sentry_metrics_gauge / _distribution for frame time, queue depth, devices online
Sessions / release health	Automatic session tracking
App-hang / ANR	App-hang watchdog with a UI-thread heartbeat
Attachments	Calibration blobs and a live UI screenshot attached to events on every platform
Screenshots	SDK screenshot capture on Windows; offscreen-rendered UI PNG attachment elsewhere
External crash reporter	Auto-wires the official sentry-desktop-crash-reporter, themed for Empower Plant
User feedback	Collected through the external crash reporter

Telemetry	Chaos Lab

Configuration (environment variables)

Variable	Default	Purpose
SENTRY_DSN	—	Sentry DSN; events are dropped if unset
SENTRY_ENVIRONMENT	production	Sentry environment
SENTRY_RELEASE	baked in at build time (empower.native@<git-sha>)	Release identifier; matches the release CI creates
EMPOWER_BACKEND_URL	https://flask.empower-plant.com	Backend used for distributed tracing
EMPOWER_CRASH_REPORTER	auto-detected next to the binary	Path to the external crash reporter
EMPOWER_DEBUG	unset	Set to enable verbose SDK logging

Headless & remote control

The same core runs without a window — used by CI to ingest events on a schedule.

# Self-drive for 90s emitting transactions/metrics/logs, then crash:
build/empower-headless --autopilot --duration 90

# Run a single scenario by id:
build/empower-headless --crash convoluted

# Accept remote commands over HTTP:
build/empower-headless --listen 8799
curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8799/trigger/heap-corruption

The GUI also renders a screenshot offscreen for review/CI without a display:

build/empower-fleet --shot fleet.png --page 0

CI

Two GitHub Actions workflows under .github/workflows:

• ci.yml builds on Linux/macOS/Windows, generates debug symbols (.dSYM / .pdb / ELF), uploads debug information files with sentry-cli debug-files upload --include-sources, creates a Sentry release, bundles the external crash reporter, and publishes build artifacts.
• run-demo.yml runs on a schedule, downloads the latest build per OS, and runs the autopilot (which is expected to crash), continuously feeding meaningful, symbolicated events into the project.

Both require the SENTRY_DSN, SENTRY_ORG, SENTRY_PROJECT and SENTRY_AUTH_TOKEN secrets.

The crash taxonomy

Every Chaos Lab scenario and the exact fault it produces is documented in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Open source

This demo is built on the following open-source components, all fetched at build time (nothing is vendored into the repository). Their licenses are permissive and compatible with this project's Apache-2.0 license:

Component	Used for	License
sentry-native	Sentry SDK + native crash backend	MIT
Dear ImGui	Immediate-mode GUI	MIT
GLFW	Window + OpenGL context	Zlib
stb_image_write	PNG screenshot encoding	Public Domain / MIT
libcurl	HTTP for distributed-trace backend calls	curl (MIT-style)
Rubik	UI typeface	SIL Open Font License 1.1
Font Awesome 6 Free	UI icons	SIL OFL 1.1 (fonts) · CC BY 4.0 (icons) · MIT (code)
sentry-desktop-crash-reporter	External crash reporter UI	MIT

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE. Copyright Functional Software, Inc. dba Sentry.