

Exceptional Software finds success in errors - dylancollins
http://gigaom.com/2012/09/21/exceptional-software-finds-success-in-errors/

======
benarent
Disclaimer. I run product at Airbrake and Exceptional.

We've passed a few great milestones recently; such as hitting over 500k
downloads of our gem and 100k users, we've continued to bring more notifiers
in-house. <https://github.com/airbrake/>

We are half way through a overhaul of the UI and will be speeding up the web-
app and greatly improving the notification system.

Thanks to all of our awesome users <http://blog.airbrake.io/category/awesome-
airbrakers/> . For people who don't have an exception tracking, I recommend
reading up on StickerMules story. <http://blog.airbrake.io/awesome-
airbrakers/sticker-mule/> after installing Airbrake and fixing bugs they
increased their conversion by nearly 3%.

Feedback and comments are always welcome to ben@airbrake.io

~~~
Hates_
I had no idea they were run by the same people.

~~~
rubyduby
they acquired them.

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calinet6
If only they didn't frequently lose our exception data, this would be great
news!

Honestly, their only job is to _store stack traces._ In about 20% of
occurrences over the last 6 months, we've been told that our data "has been
lost and is not recoverable." Thus we know that an exception has occurred, but
we're lost as to why.

It's such a simple app that we've considered rolling our own. We believe we
can achieve better than 80% uptime.

~~~
benarent
Hi @calinet6. Sorry to hear that you've been having issues with your account.
Please send a mail to support@airbrake.io or support@exceptional.io (depending
on your product) and we'll be happy to look into this issue for you.

~~~
calinet6
I have, and I've been told the bug has been fixed and I should not see the
issue again. I've been told this twice now (1 month apart). I think hearing
"the issue is resolved" is about as finished as the issue can be, I guess I
can only hope it doesn't come up a third time.

So, your uptime average is slowly creeping up again. Otherwise we're
relatively happy with the service—it's just that there isn't much "otherwise"
besides simply viewing the stack trace. Honestly there's not much to it.

Congrats on your achievement and all, but it's difficult for me to get excited
about an app that any competent programmer could probably whip up in a day or
two.

~~~
evincarofautumn
“an app that any competent programmer could probably whip up in a day or two”

You must tread very, very carefully when using those words. Being programmers
does not magically admit us to a complete understanding of every detail of a
piece of software. If you’ve ever delivered a product, you should know that
what the user sees is only a fraction of the whole—even if the user happens to
be a competent programmer. And if you consider yourself such a programmer, why
not try replicating their software from scratch, if it will really only take a
day or two?

~~~
calinet6
I completely agree, obviously there are many complications and other concerns
that could make it a much more difficult task.

I envision most of the difficulty that exceptional.io has encountered has been
related to scalability. If I wanted a small, simple, self-hosted application
with this functionality, it will probably be simpler. I'm not guaranteeing
this, but I'm making a good estimate based on my experience creating similar
web apps and utilities throughout my career—this ain't no blind shot in the
dark guess.

You're right, being programmers does not make us magically able to understand
details of software. But being _good_ software engineers _does_ involve a lot
of exactly that skill. They are separate and distinct skills, but most great
programmers I know are also great software engineers, and also great
estimaters of project complexity. In my experience, I am as well (in fact I am
generally better at estimating project architecture, complexity and time than
I am at programming itself). This is where my response comes from—not simply
being a programmer. Apologies for the confusion.

------
driverdan
And yet their JS error handing is still terrible.

~~~
benarent
We're mid-way through a re-write of our JS notifier (
<https://github.com/airbrake/airbrake-js> ) . We still use stacktrace.js; and
are going to do some backend server improvements such as a JSON API, and the
ability to async send errors without any other blocking. If you have a
specific issue please open up a ticket on the repro.
<https://github.com/airbrake/airbrake-js/issues>

------
pkmiec
Ditto on the bad uptime and data retention. I've also had issues with support
taking a week to respond.

In addition, exceptional does not support looking at the data in interesting
ways (i.e. exceptions from this machine, exceptions for this customers, how
many customers are affected by a problem, etc). I have to configure
applications to send exceptions to difference projects which is a huge pain
when you need to change something.

Their 404s idea is useful, but inflexible, as sometimes I do care about
getting notified about RecordNotFound, etc.

Thanks for the ratchet.io, whoopsapp.com, and sentry suggestions.

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andrew93101
We've had nothing but problems with exceptional. We've experienced multi-day
outages, that only got resolved by calling the company. Our operations staff
won't even use the product anymore (insufficient data is retained to permit
the sort of forensics they need to do), so we send email exception
notifications in addition to exceptional.

From speaking to other companies in our position, it sounds like there are no
good solutions on the market currently. We unfortunately plan on building our
own solution in-house.

~~~
benarent
Hi Andrew93101. I'll be happy to also review your account. Exceptional.io
currently stores the last 30 occurrences; if you require more we're rolling
our a higher storage plan. You can reach me at ben@exceptional.io

------
benarent
For those into stats / infographics, we've created one.
[http://blog.exceptional.io/site-news/exceptional-
infographic...](http://blog.exceptional.io/site-news/exceptional-infographic/)

Some fun facts; half our customers are outside the US. We processed 145
million unique errors in the month of July.

------
rubyduby
100K customers != 100K users

I wonder how many people create multiple free accounts for each of their
websites, so it might be like 5K PAYING customers right?

