My Favorite Error Tracker for Webapps

Airbrake has made error tracking easy for us and I enjoy that the interface and feature set continue to improve over the years.

Pros

Airbrake is one of the items on our checklist to setup with every new webapp we create. The setup is fast and it provides immediate value. Being able to receive an email for a new error that comes in is indispensable.

Cons

I would like to see Airbrake integrate with Kanbanery as that is our agile project management tool of choice. It does already integrate with Trello and Pivotal Tracker. Finally, while we use Airbrake on all of our apps, we do not always upgrade to a paid plan as it is simply more than we need. If Airbrake had one more lower tier paid option, then we would consider upgrading more apps to paid plans.

Airbrake is a great error monitoring product

We rely on Airbrake for additional production and test environment monitoring of app exceptions. By linking Airbrake error alerts to HipChat notifications, we get great high-level alerts whenever an error happens, right in our team chat room. It's easy to drill down into the error details with the UI. We also use the Comments feature of the Airbrake errors to reduce bystander effect among team members -- no comment means nobody triaged the issue.

Pros

Great UI, easy to drill into the errors. It's great how they roll up errors of similar types intelligently. The "Occurrences" view is especially helpful, to know which errors are infrequent and which deserve higher attention.

A Long Running Service For Exception Reporting

We used Airbrake for many years and found it easy to integrate it into projects with Ruby on Rails and other popular frameworks. Over time the company has shifted more towards using Rollbar which is compatible with Airbrake clients but had more advanced server side aggregation of errors and other search / filtering features that came in handy for us.

Pros

It is easy to setup with popular frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Python. Its compatible with similar products which helps avoid vendor lock-in. The service has been running a long time and has established a track record of being reliable.

Cons

It is a bit light on features compared to some of the newer competitors. The main decision points for me would be cost and how easily the UI allows you to access the information you need. I think there are competitors with a better UI and the pricing would probably depend on your team size.

Airbrake

Pros

Attached stack trace is easy to view and navigate.

Cons

UI is not necessarily the most user-friendly or intuitive.

Bots, and plugins, and cache invalidation, oh my!

Airbrake has been amazing. We were able to get it installed, configured, tested, and deployed to two applications in about 30 minutes thanks to their open-source packages and concise documentation. We were even able to update Airbrake with information about our releases (git commit #) so we knew exactly what version of the code we were running when a problem began. We went from being overwhelmed with noisy, pointless, and ultimately ignored exception emails to getting just a few clean and concise notifications. Logging into the site gives you access to a plethora of additional information, as well as an "aggregations" tab that shows the commonality between logically grouped exceptions. We set up a WordPress blog (there's a plugin!) and an aging ASP MVC site. We had initially assumed that the exceptions would be "dumbed down" to the lowest common denominator, but we were pleasantly surprised to see that each product included platform specific information. Everything is neatly organized and visualized so that it's easy and intuitive to make sense of the mass of information. With roughly 30 minutes of setup we were finally able to pinpoint an issue that we had been speculating about for months. (Bots, and plugins, and cache invalidation, oh my!) Finally, it's obvious that Airbrake has put a lot of effort and attention into user experience. The interface is so clean, concise, and understandable that it's oddly tempting to show off. Airbrake is easy to setup, smartly alerts, smartly organizes, is a pleasure to use, and we strangely want to show off our exceptions...5 stars!

Pros

Easy to setup Reduces email alerts Smartly organizes Easy to use We love showing it off

Cons

I wish it would fix the exceptions too :)