Customizing 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.

Grouping by Component

If you have components that you'd prefer to monitor separately, a quick way to get custom error grouping is to specify a component which errors on the current page belong to:

javascript

  

Honeybadger.configure({
  // ...
  component: 'users',
  action: 'index'
});

The action is optional, and does not affect grouping. In Rails, for instance, the component and action could map to the controller and action names, respectively.

You can also specify the component (and action) when reporting caught errors:

javascript

Honeybadger.notify(error, {
  component: 'myComponent'
});

Creating Your Own Fingerprints

You can also create your own fingerprints by assigning a unique string to the fingerprint option. Errors which have the same fingerprint will be grouped, while Honeybadger's default fingerprint will be ignored.

To calculate a fingerprint when reporting caught errors:

javascript

Honeybadger.notify(err, {
  fingerprint: 'my unique fingerprint'
});

To calculate a fingerprint for all errors (even uncaught ones), use a beforeNotify handler:

javascript

Honeybadger.beforeNotify(function(notice) {
  notice.fingerprint = calculateFingerprint(notice);
});

In this example, the function calculateFingerprint should use the properties on notice to generate a string that is unique for each type of error.

The following notice properties are available in notice objects:

notice.stack - The stack trace (read only)
notice.backtrace - The parsed backtrace object
notice.name - The exception class name
notice.message - The error message
notice.url - The current url
notice.projectRoot - The root url
notice.environment - Name of the environment. example: "production"
notice.component - Similar to a rails controller name. example: "users"
notice.action - Similar to a rails action name. example: "create"
notice.fingerprint - A unique fingerprint, used to customize grouping of errors in Honeybadger
notice.context - The context object
notice.tags - A string comma-separated list of tags
notice.params - An object of request parameters
notice.session - An object of request session key/values
notice.headers - An object of request headers
notice.cookies - An object of cookie key/values. May also be sent as a string in the document.cookie "foo=bar;bar=baz" format.

The following additional notice properties are available in afterNotify handlers:

notice.id - The UUID of the error in Honeybadger