When Sentry-side behavior changes with no email (e.g. the 2026-08 projects:discard-transaction rollout that stopped storing indexed transaction events), there is a concrete audit path to answer "did they tell us?" — and a trap in it.
Channels, in order of 'would have notified us', all checkable programmatically:
GET /api/0/broadcasts/— the feed behind Sentry's in-app "what's new" notices. In practice it mirrors the public changelog (sentry.io/changelog); if a change appears in neither, no push notification was ever generated for it.- status.sentry.io — incidents only; feature rollouts never appear here.
- Org-level feature flags — Sentry's promised "we will update our product messaging" can resolve to nothing more than a feature-flagged web-UI banner. For the transactions deprecation the flag is
organizations:performance-transaction-deprecation-banner("warning banner to inform users of pending deprecation of the transactions dataset", registered insrc/sentry/features/temporary.py). A banner is invisible to API/CLI/cron consumers, so tooling-first orgs get zero effective notice. - Zendesk FAQ articles pre-announce migrations but are now behind a login wall (
sentry.zendesk.comredirects to sign-in), so verify their existence via search-engine caches or the URL's presence in search results.
The trap: GET /api/0/organizations/{org}/ does NOT include a features array (unlike the project detail endpoint, which does). Piping it to jq '.features[]' fails with cannot use null as iterable. Org-level flags require the query param: GET /api/0/organizations/{org}/?include_feature_flags=1. Project-level flags need no param: GET /api/0/projects/{org}/{slug}/ always carries features.
Timeline corroboration without internal access: Sentry's Flagpole rollout configs live in getsentry/sentry-options-automator, which is PRIVATE (404), so rollout dates can't be read directly. But getsentry/self-hosted release notes are a usable proxy: 26.7.0 (2026-07-16) shipped "Add in transactions -> spans migration flags" (PR #4402), placing the flag machinery one month before the SaaS org-by-org flag flip observed 2026-08-10/12. Third-party changelog aggregators (releases.sh/sentry) also record UI removals (Explore → Discover → Transactions removed Aug 2026) that Sentry's own changelog omits.
Transferable rule: for any SaaS vendor with feature-flag-driven rollouts, "was it announced?" decomposes into (a) the programmatic announcement feed, (b) the changelog, (c) the status page, and (d) whether the 'notice' was itself a feature flag you can query — and a UI banner counts as notice only for humans who use the web UI.