What is Sentry?
You know how sometimes the game starts to stutter or hitch, especially in a raid or a busy city, and you can't tell whether it's your computer, your internet, or one of your addons? Sentry is an addon that answers that question for you.
It sits quietly in the background and keeps an eye on your other addons. If one of them starts hogging your game's time and causing those little freezes, Sentry notices and tells you which one it was. It's not a "make the game faster" addon. It's the one that points at the culprit.
Why should I use it?
Because without it, the usual fix is the one everyone hates: turn off all your addons, turn them back on one at a time, and play for a while after each to see if the stutter comes back. That can eat an evening. Sentry does that detective work while you just play normally.
- It only bothers you when something is really wrong. Every addon uses a tiny bit of your game's time; that's normal. Sentry uses the same bar Blizzard's own performance warning uses, so it won't nag you about an addon that's just doing its job. If it flags something, that addon was noticeably hurting your frame rate, repeatedly, over the last several minutes, not one hiccup during a loading screen.
- It tells the difference between "hiccup" and "problem". An addon that stuttered once when you opened your bags gets a mild note. An addon that keeps doing it every half-minute for five minutes gets a clear "this one is the problem". You don't have to interpret numbers.
- It gives you something to hand to the addon's author. Sentry writes a short report: which addon, how bad, how often. Paste that into the addon's bug page and the author has exactly what they need. That gets you a fix a lot faster than "it feels laggy sometimes".
Do I need to set anything up?
No. Install it, log in, play. There's an icon by your minimap if you want the dashboard, but you
never have to open it. If nothing's wrong, you'll forget it's there. That's the point.
Will it slow my game down?
That was rule one when building it. A performance watchdog that costs performance would be a
bad joke. It checks a handful of addons at a time on a slow cycle, and does nothing at all
during the moments that matter most.
Does it do anything besides watch addons? What about my graphics card or CPU?
Not much, on purpose. Sentry is an addon, and addons can only see what the game shows them: how long each addon took, how much memory each uses, your overall frame rate, and your connection delay to the server. That's the whole window.
It cannot see your graphics card or CPU. No addon can. The game doesn't tell addons what card you have, how hot it runs, or how busy your processor is. Anything claiming to monitor hardware from inside WoW is guessing or showing something else.
What Sentry can do is tell you when the stutter is NOT an addon. If your frame rate drops and none of your addons are taking real time, the fix is somewhere else.
The Sentry: The Addon Monitor Team
Owner
