I think I figured out what is happening. It’s my fault (user confusion) fueled by (arguably) a UX issue?
My screenshots above in the original question are showing two different issues — one with 1.2k events, another with 76 events — not the same issue, like I had stated. In fact, I’ve discovered there are actually three distinct issues where these “too many request” events are grouped.
These three issues are ostensibly about 404s, 429s, and 404s respectively — however, when I click-through to look at the events list, I can see that each of these issues all contain events for three different HTTP errors (404s, 429s, and 500s):
OpenURI::HTTPError: 404 Not FoundOpenURI::HTTPError: 429 Too Many RequestsOpenURI::HTTPError: 500 Internal Server Error
I had assumed that these different HTTP errors were split-out into their own issues, but they’re all being grouped together into the same OpenURI::HTTPError issue. The fact that there are three different OpenURI::HTTPError issues further confused me — two of these issues are for the same function, one is for a separate function, so at the very least, there are two different errors here.
Right now, if I search “too many requests”, I still only get one result, because (I think) that Sentry is searching the issue’s current summary, which can change every time a new event comes through (speculating here)?
I don’t recall, and there doesn’t appear to be, any merging that had occurred. I’m not sure why there would be three separate issues that all contain events for three separate HTTP errors — I would expect for these to be split out, but I bet this is a hard problem to solve (how aggressively to group).
I hope this helps someone in the future!