
Ask HN: What exception tracking service do you use? - flippyhead
There&#x27;s quite a few including BugSnag, AirBrake, HoneyBadger and more I&#x27;m sure. Any recommendations on which is best?
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ianstallings
Not sure if this surprises anyone but it surprised me when I found it - I use
Google Analytics for iOS. Their library handles platform exceptions and I use
it as a catch-all for ones I didn't see coming:
[https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...](https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/ios/v2/exceptions)

I also use Test Flight's reporting to do the same but I don't push that lib to
production usually, where as the GA one is already handling analytics, so it
ships.

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Shish2k
Email with stack trace attached, and md5(filename + line number) as the thread
ID so that errors from the same place get grouped together.

~~~
goo
Me too on this. I feel like someday something will outshine this, that day is
not yet today. (for a small/medium python web app)

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agotterer
We use Bugsnag. It's been great and easily integrates into a variety of
platforms.

~~~
foobar2k
James from Bugsnag here, we're constantly rolling out tons of new features to
speed up the find/fix/deploy bug hunting cycle. I'm surprised so many people
are still using emails for error monitoring, using a hosted service like
Bugsnag/airbrake/rollbar will massively help with productivity and
actionability.

~~~
petenixey
James I didn't realise Bugsnag was you - in that case we'll give it a roll.
I've been wanting something to switch to

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Dirlewanger
Even though it's not its highlight feature, New Relic. Its panoply of other
amazing features make it well worth it.

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haney
New Relic is a god sent.

~~~
trjordan
Have you looked at AppNeta?

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Herbert2
Self hosted sentry, very pleased with it.

~~~
jensenbox
Personally, for a Django project, Sentry is probably the best integrated
solution.

We use the self hosted solution. Works great!

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zmillman
We're using HoneyBadger at Magoosh. It's been working quite well for us. The
Capistrano integration for tracking deployments is really handy.

We used to use Exceptional because it was really cheap, but maintenance and
bugfixes seemed to have stopped so we made the switch

~~~
cmer
+1 for Honeybadger. Moved away from Airbrake and we've been happy campers.

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cjbprime
Using Sentry here at FlightCar. Have had very good experiences:

[https://twitter.com/cjbprime/status/347467911050448896](https://twitter.com/cjbprime/status/347467911050448896)

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benarent
Disclaimer: I work on Exceptional and Airbrake.

We eat our down dog food and use newrelic and logentries. We've a few big
updates in the coming months. If you would like to get early access please
email ben@airbrake.io

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mickeyben
Don't know which is best but we used airbrake and getexceptional in the past
and it had massive issues. We now use BugSnag on 4 rails apps (ruby and js) +
one node.js app and it just works.

~~~
boundlessdreamz
What kind of issues?

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mickeyben
We stopped getting exceptions a dozen times from a few hours to a couple of
days. And no the exceptions didn't came up after that delay, it's like they
were never sent.

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bryanmig
After using an email-based homegrown solution that I thought was sufficient, I
gave RayGun.io a shot. I use it for .NET exception tracking and I am about to
wire it up to a Rails app, and a very very large Backbone JS application.

It is really quite good (at least for .NET). The management UI is great and
does a very nice job of grouping duplicates, similar issues, etc.

I already use some dev tools from Mindscape (their .NET ORM, LightSpeed) and
their products and support are top notch in my experience.

[http://raygun.io](http://raygun.io)

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michaelmior
Rollbar here as well and TestFlight for iOS. We'd love to use Rollbar for iOS
as well, but the support isn't great right now. That said, their support team
has been great.

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drdaeman
For non-web, home-made exception handler that dumps the trace to syslog. Then,
FATAL and ERROR-levelled entries are forwarded by email (rsyslog's ommail
module;
[http://www.rsyslog.com/doc/ommail.html](http://www.rsyslog.com/doc/ommail.html)).

For web, I mostly use Django and Flask and both have [almost, in Flask's case]
built-in one features, that sends an email with backtrace and request details
when a bug happens.

Should I pay more attention to alternatives?

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addflip
Sentry. We pay for them to host it.

~~~
oellegaard
+1 - A great example of open source also generating a good business - for
users and hopefully the author :-)

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daigoba66
For the .NET crowd, ELMAH
([https://code.google.com/p/elmah/](https://code.google.com/p/elmah/)) is the
way to go.

~~~
nreece
Recently attended a presentation on Appfail (for .NET) by its founders. Liked
the product and team: [http://appfail.net](http://appfail.net)

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drrotmos
While not exception tracking per se, we use New Relic and we also log
exceptions to a special Graylog2 stream. It's working very well actually.

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mrgordon
Rollbar. We used to use Airbrake but Rollbar has been much better for us. It
is still pretty new but they are constantly adding features.

~~~
PascalW
We've been using Airbrake also, have been experiencing quite some issues with
exceptions not showing up and slowness of the web ui.

I've been using Sentry [1] lately and it has been excellent. Only issue has
been that using SSL from Java was quite troublesome as their certificate is
not supported by the JVM by default [2].

[1] [http://getsentry.com](http://getsentry.com) [2]
[https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/issues/903](https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/issues/903)

Edit: Rollbar looks interesting. Too bad they don't have an API for Java.

~~~
mrgordon
I have used the Rollbar Clojure client library and I found it to be adequate
FWIW

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dmishe
Sentry on heroku, [https://github.com/dmishe/sentry-on-
heroku](https://github.com/dmishe/sentry-on-heroku) or any fork

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runako
ProjectLocker (where I work) has integrated exception tracking, so I use that.
Especially useful: Twitter notifications of exceptions, which show up on my
phone.

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joestelmach
[https://gist.github.com/bobvawter/5986508](https://gist.github.com/bobvawter/5986508)

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whitehat2k9
Emailed stacktraces to my personal email :D

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xentronium
We use airbrake with self-hosted errbit (opensource airbrake api-compatible
clone) server.

~~~
flippyhead
Both them and exceptional seem to be in zombie mode. Massive bugs that have
remained in place for what feels like years, no new features etc. I'd like to
go with someone who cares!

~~~
zachanker
That's what errbit is for. You only have to use the Airbrake libraries for
reporting the errors, and errbit hosted locally collects/notifies/displays
them.

If you already integrated with Airbrake, you just have to reconfigure the host
it reports to, to your own errbit server and it'll swap everything over from
deploy tracking to error reporting.

Errbit is an active project,
[https://github.com/errbit/errbit](https://github.com/errbit/errbit), and
error reporting libraries don't tend to need a lot of maintenance.

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sbeckeriv
Honeybadger so far. Working well enough. Love the deduping.

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ExpiredLink
What is an "exception tracking service"?

~~~
davefp
When your code crashes, it (usually) generates a report telling you what went
wrong. This is an exception report.

An exception tracking service provides an place that you can send, store, and
index these reports. It'll usually allow you to view them, search them, group
similar errors, and generally provide tools that are useful when trying to
resolve the problems that are occurring.

~~~
ExpiredLink
Thank you. Soothing like the Windows event viewer ...

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joshcrowder
Errbit

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davefp
Errbit

