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:
- Installing the honeybadger library
- Setting the API key
- 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, Vue, Elixir, Go, NodeJS, Java, Python, PHP, Clojure and Cocoa.
Once our client library is installed and configured, errors thrown by your application are automatically sent to our API.
Error Grouping
Honeybadger groups similar exceptions together using rules which we've found to work the best in most cases. The default information we use to group errors is:
- The file name, method name, and line number of the error's location
- The class name of the error
- The component/controller name
We use this information to construct a "fingerprint" of the exception. Exceptions with the same fingerprint are treated as the same error in Honeybadger.
You can customize the grouping for each exception by changing the error class name, component, or stack trace—or by sending a custom fingerprint.
Anatomy of an error
When your app reports an error to us, we make the details available on a web page that looks like this:
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.
Navigating Occurrences
Honeybadger groups identical errors together. Using our navigation bar, you can still navigate between each individual occurrence of the error.
Resolve / Unresolve
When an error is marked "unresolved" we won't send you any additonal notifications when it re-occurs. Errors are ususally auto-resolved on deploy.
Actions
Here you can perform many of the actions available to your error. Also, as you set up integrations for the project, any that can link back to the error (say, an issue tracker like GitHub) can be managed here.
Pause or Ignore an Error
Speaking of actions, one of the more common ones is to ignore the occurrences an error.
Pausing
You can choose to "Pause" for a time duration or occurrence count. We will still record the occurrences, we just won't notify you.
Ignoring
When you "ignore" an error we will stop recording altogether, so it won't go against your quota.
Notices
Notices are the individual error events that are sent from your app. We also refer to them as occurrences as well.
The Notices section allows you to see the distribution of occurrences over time. You can constrain the dates and filter using the same search criteria as our error search.
Comments
Communicate with team members, or record notes to retain context around an error. Your comments can be formatted in Github flavored markdown.
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.
Request Params, Cookies, ENV, etc.
When an error occurs during a web request, we record all the relevant debug info like params, cookies, the session, etc.
Context Data
Our clients support providing a special set of data called context. This data is provided by you to help with debugging. You can use our search functionality to find errors with specific context.
user_id
and user_email
are special context keys that we use to help with
looking up users or sending emails (as you can see below.)
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.
Search
With advanced search, you can search by any field of params, environment, cookies or the session. Check out our dedicated search guide for more info.
Content Security Policy Reports
If you use Content Security Policy (CSP) headers to help mitigate
XSS attacks, you can use Honeybadger to track policy violations. You
can configure the required headers via code when using
Rails or Sinatra, or you can configure your
web server or framework to emit the headers. Either way, configuring CSP
reporting requires specifying the report-uri
directive:
Content-Security-Policy: ...; report-uri https://api.honeybadger.io/v1/browser/csp?api_key=HB_API_KEY_GOES_HERE&env=production
Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only: ...; report-uri https://api.honeybadger.io/v1/browser/csp?api_key=HB_API_KEY_GOES_HERE&report_only=true&env=production
The env
and report_only
parameters are optional. When report_only
is true, CSP report payloads will show up as "CSP Report" in our UI;
otherwise, the label will be "CSP Error".
Since CSP violations can be noisy, we strongly suggest you track them in a separate Honeybadger project.
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. 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:
If you're using Atom, make sure you're on version 1.23 or later for this to work.
Disclaimer: We do not endorse nor support these libraries; they are 3rd party open source software.