Crash Reporting is the product Raygun was built on. It has been on the market for over three years and is focused on capturing and tracking any errors or exceptions that happen inside a deployed application.
Raygun is an award-winning, New Zealand-based producer of development support products that are available via subscription as either a fully hosted Software-as-a-Service offering, or on-premise deployments.
What does Crash Reporting do?
The tag line from Raygun sums it up nicely: The product provides “Instant notification of errors and crashes that are affecting your customers.”
Ease of Setup
The free trial is easy to get up and running. You should definitely sign up for one if you are even just remotely interested in implementing the product. The free trial signs you up for all the tools that Raygun offers.
Once logged into the Raygun console, just follow a couple steps to start capturing error reports:
- “Create Crash Reporting application”
- Name the application
- Select your software development language (currently over 25 options listed)
- Follow the guide and copy/paste the code snippets into your app
One nice touch is that if you are logged in, the code snippets already have your application API key in them, so you can just copy/paste.
Example: JavaScript code snippet
Adding additional runtimes (even based on different languages) to the same application is just as easy. The documentation is readily available with lots of samples of GitHub to follow along with.
Licensing and Deployment Options
Pricing for the most common plans is readily available on Raygun.com, and the common consensus seems to fall along the lines of “Crashlytics is free” (they only do mobile) or “Even HockeyApp has a free tier” (for one team member). Both of these statements are true, but miss the point. With unlimited team members and the widest range of languages available, Raygun Crash Reporting fills a void—It can be used in any application you have in your portfolio and accessed by as many support staff members as needed.
In-addition the Enterprise Tier has an on-premises option which is definitely a competitive advantage. This will be especially valuable for any company that has legal or contractual requirements around where data can reside. Data sovereignty is becoming a dealbreaker in certain regions like Europe.
Integration Plugins, Version Tracking, and Error Groups
Crash Reporting allows the tracking of individual application versions and ties errors produced to the version. This makes it easier to sort and see what errors started or stopped based on individual deployments.
It is easy to build out multiple workflows, called Error Groups, to handle different errors inside an application based on data. These Error Groups can have a single filter or multiple filters as part of their definition. Filters range from version number to source machine to custom-defined tags that are passed as part of the error the application sends. These groups can be given different notification settings or be sent to other systems through a plugin.
Example of some of the data received that you could filter.
Crash Reporting has an extensive list of plugins which act as integration points to third party services, from collaboration tools like Slack and HipChat to software and project planning tools like Asana and Jira. The breadth of integration points available shows the wide range of use cases for Crash Reporting inside software development teams.
Conclusion
If you are looking for a product in the space that can capture errors in more than just mobile applications, like your service layer or traditional web applications, then Crash Reporting by Raygun will definitely meet your needs.
