Crash Reporting Tips Using Raygun

Are you a new comer to Raygun Crash Reporting?  A veteran user?  Either way you may not know about these Raygun quick crash reporting tips that may give you a little extra power in your battle against errors!

Crash Reporting Tip 1:

As you may already know, the Summary tab gives you a quick look at important information from an error report.  What you may not have known is that you can customize the information that shows up (or doesn’t show up!) on the Summary tab!

First, click on any error group to get to the Summary details of that group.

Then click on the Error Details tab (or any other non-Summary tab)

Click on any of the stars on the right hand side of the Error Details window to add (yellow star) or remove (grey star) information to the Summary tab details.  For this example, we’re going to click on the Error Id start to add it.

Now if you go back to the Summary tab details you will see that the Error Id is now included in the summary!

Things to Note:  This setting is per user across all errors, so your team members can choose what information they personally find most important on the Summary tab.

Crash Reporting Tip 2:

Sometimes our applications have errors that we know about but don’t currently plan to fix or simply can not fix at the moment.  Whether it be some minor JavaScript bug that occasionally pops up or a “junk” exception being thrown in one of your most recent deploys, it can be quite frustrating to see that error popping up in Raygun over and over.  Well thankfully you can add these errors to your Permanently Ignored list inside Raygun itself and set it to not track further occurrences.

Start off by going to your clicking on Crash Reporting in the left sidebar navigation menu to bring up your list of Error Groups.

From there, select the error(s) you wish to Permanently Ignore.

Now click on the blue Change Status drop down menu and select Permanently Ignore from the list of options.  This will bring up a dialog box where you will want to ensure that the check box is checked in order to prevent further incidences of this exception from being tracked and counting against your monthly volume.

Two of the major benefits using this enhanced functionality are that it prevents future occurrences of the exception from counting against your monthly volume limits and it doesn’t require you to modify your code base to switch the tracking off and on again.

Things to Note:  This only affects future recurrences of the error; previous occurrences will still count against the related monthly volume.

Crash Reporting Tip 3:

With most crash reporting services you’re limited on the number of users that you can add to help manage the exceptions that Raygun captures.  Luckily Raygun doesn’t have a user limit so you can have all the key members of your organization inside the application triaging bugs and tracking their status.  In order to help make things easier to track for your team, you can view the user Audit Log in Raygun to see a run down of the changes made across all the applications on your plan.  This includes changes to the error reports, application settings, and even the plan itself.

You can access the Audit Log by clicking on the user drop down menu in the upper right hand corner of your Raygun window.

Once the Audit Log window loads, you can select what information you wish to filter the results by via the left sidebar options.

In the main window you can see the results of the filter options selected as well as set a specific time frame to search by.

As you can see, there are some helpful features included in Raygun that sometimes get missed in normal day-to-day use.  While they may not be ground-breaking abilities, they do help speed up and better organize the chaotic world of production error tracking!

If you have any other crash reporting tips or tricks that you have discovered while using Raygun please reach out to us and let us know!