Error Monitoring

 

Installation

Before you can start using Honeybadger to squash bugs, you'll need to install our library into your app. Installation ususally boils down to:

  1. Installing the honeybadger library
  2. Setting the API key
  3. Enabling error reporting

The details vary a little depending on language and platform. But you can always find the correct installation instructions for YOUR app on the "Project Settings" page.

In case you're wondering, we officially support: Ruby, client-side Javascript, NodeJS, Elixir, Go, and Java.

When your app reports an error to us, we make the details available on a web page that looks like this:

Error Detail Page Overview

Yeah, it looks a little complicated. But once you understand what all the pieces are, you'll see it's quite simple.

Let's inspect this page, piece by piece.

Honeybadger groups identical errors together, but you can still navigate between each individual occurrence of the error.

Occurrence Navigation

Resolved / Unresolved

When an error is marked "unresolved" we won't send you any additonal notifications when it re-occurrs. Errors are ususally auto-resolved on deploy.

Resolved and Unresolved

Issue Trackers

You can hook up you issue tracker of choice and manually or automatically add errors to it. You can also comment on the error in Github flavored markdown.

Error actions

Anatomy of an error

Backtrace

Each line in the backtrace links to the github or bitbucket repo. You can even click a button to open the file in your local editor.

Backtrace

Request Params, Cookies, ENV, etc.

When an error occurrs during a web request, we record all the relevent debug info like params, cookies, the session, etc.

Params

Browsing errors

Once you start collecting errors, it can be difficult to keep track of them. To make it easier, we've built a great interface for browsing and searching errors.

Navigating Errors

With advanced search, you can search by any field of params, environment, cookies or the session.

You use advanced search by entering a special syntax into the search box. Here are a few examples:

If you'd like to search "all errors encountered by people using Chrome", you can type this into our search box:

request.user_agent:*Chrome*

And you can search deep within the hashes of data that are sent to us when an error is reported, like the context or params:

context.user.favorites.color:blue

Local Edits

One of the advanced features in Honeybadger is configuring your local editor settings so that we can display links to open files locally when showing you an error backtrace:

To configure your editor,  visit the Editor Settings page under My Profile. Select the editor you use (if you use a different editor which supports opening files via a custom protocol, let us know about it. Next, enter the absolute path to each project you wish to enable local editor links for, and click "Save" at the bottom. Re-visit your error pages - they should now have the "Open in editor" links!

If you're using TextMate or MacVim, you should be all set. Atom, Sublime, and Visual Studio Code don't ship with a custom protocol by default. In order to make them work, you'll need to install one of these libraries:

Disclaimer: We do not endorse nor support these libraries; they are 3rd party open source software.