Posts on Raygun Blog

How to Set Up Raygun's Remote MCP Server in Cursor and Codex

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Learn how to connect Raygun’s remote MCP server to Cursor and Codex in minutes, then watch an AI agent use live production error data to investigate and fix a real issue.

API update: error instances

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Raygun introduces three API endpoints to efficiently list, fetch, and analyze error instances, empowering developers to automate workflows and enrich alerts with precise error data.

Transform your workflow with Raygun's remote MCP

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Raygun’s remote MCP server offers developers seamless integration and deeper insights for enhanced AI performance. Experience improved workflows with simplified setup and richer context.

Smarter alerts using P75 for more signal and less noise

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve rolled out a new feature in Raygun Alerting that gives you more control over how you track and respond to performance regressions. Starting today, you can now use the 75th percentile (P75) as a filter option for page performance data in Real User Monitoring, such as Core Web Vitals and page load time, right alongside the default ‘Average’.

Smarter 'Ignore' error status controls for flexible alerting

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 02:00:00 +0000

We’ve heard your feedback and are excited to roll out an improvement to Raygun’s ‘Ignore error status’ functionality, which gives you more control over how and when you suppress errors.

Using observability tools for security monitoring and incident detection

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 02:00:00 +0000

Most security teams overlook a goldmine of data sitting right in their applications — crash reports and Real User Monitoring (RUM) telemetry. While engineers typically use these tools for performance tracking, they can reveal security incidents that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Introducing Raygun CLI: Level-up your error tracking workflow

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 02:00:00 +0000

Raygun CLI is a powerful command-line interface tool designed to enhance the developer experience when working with Raygun’s error tracking and performance monitoring platform.

From writing code to running a company of 300+ employees

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 02:00:00 +0000

Welcome to another exciting edition of Founders and Friends, where we delve into conversations with visionary leaders shaping the tech industry. Today’s conversation features John-Daniel Trask (JD), CEO of Raygun, and Paul Stovell, CEO of Octopus Deploy. Together, they explore the realities of running software businesses, from the evolving nature of agile practices to scaling software teams efficiently. Let’s dive into their insights.

Managing code quality at scale with NDepend

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 02:00:00 +0000

Ensuring code quality at scale is one of the biggest challenges in software development. As applications grow in size and complexity, producing high-quality, maintainable code becomes increasingly vital. In a recent conversation on the Founder & Friends podcast, Raygun CEO John-Daniel Trask (JD) sat down with Patrick Smacchia, founder of NDepend, to discuss how this tool is revolutionizing .NET development.

Unlock better Flutter error insights with native symbols support

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 02:00:00 +0000

We’re excited to announce that native symbols support for Flutter is now live in Raygun Crash Reporting! If you’ve ever struggled with obfuscated stack traces in your Flutter apps, this update will simplify your debugging workflow and give you more actionable insights into app crashes.

Top 10 .NET exceptions (part two)

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 02:00:00 +0000

In Part 1, we walked through the top 5 most common .NET exceptions—breaking down what triggers them and how to fix them. Now, we’re rounding out the list with five more exceptions every .NET developer is bound to encounter at some point.

Introducing time boards for Raygun Dashboards

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 02:00:00 +0000

We’re excited to announce our latest feature, time boards, which will transform how you analyze your software issues and bottlenecks. This powerful enhancement to Raygun Dashboards offers an alternate way to visualize your dashboard data by synchronizing time across all dashboard tiles.

Raygun's 2024 in review: New features that empower developers

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 02:00:00 +0000

As 2024 wraps up, we’re taking a moment to look back at the updates and tools we launched to make your life as a developer and Raygun user easier. This year, we focused on enhancing how you monitor errors, track performance, and optimize user experiences. Here’s a breakdown of the key features we shipped in 2024.

Top 10 .NET exceptions (part one)

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 02:00:00 +0000

Common .NET exceptions can make or break your application. While NullReferenceException might leave you scratching your head over cryptic stack traces, database and network exceptions like MySQLException or HttpRequestException often signal deeper resource or connectivity problems. Let’s explore these key exceptions, what causes them, and how to handle them effectively to build more robust applications.

Getting started with Raygun Crash Reporting using Raygun4Android

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 09:13:09 +1300

This article was last updated in January 2025 to adhere to best practices.

Building native mobile apps can be a daunting challenge. Even if you ignore the choice of building separate iOS/Android apps or using cross-platform technology, writing native apps is hard.

The development process of native apps involves a lot of testing and debugging. While the app is still under initial development this usually happens on test devices of the developers or dedicated testers. When problems arise or the app crashes, these incidents are often observable and can be debugged.

Engineering AI systems with Model Context Protocol

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 02:00:00 +0000

On November 26, 2024, Anthropic released the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—an open standard for data exchange between applications and data sources. MCP simplifies how Large Language Models (LLMs) interact with external tools and data, addressing the challenges developers face when integrating AI into their systems.

New Microsoft ILogger integration with Raygun

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 02:00:00 +0000

We’ve added support for Microsoft’s ILogger to the Raygun4Net provider! Once configured, exceptions recorded with ILogger are sent straight to Raygun automatically—no extra code or custom logic required. This makes it easier than ever for .NET developers to integrate Raygun into their apps and take advantage of powerful exception tracking to squash bugs faster.

New option to reverse stack traces in Crash Reporting

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 03:00:00 +0000

We’ve added a new option in Raygun Crash Reporting to reverse the order of stack traces in the app. Now you can customize how stack traces are displayed to suit your workflow and preference.

New API endpoint to add comments to error groups

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 03:30:00 +0000

We’ve added a new Raygun API endpoint that enables you to comment on error groups in Crash Reporting without logging into the app. With this endpoint, you can automate adding context through your CI/CD pipeline, link to internal tickets, or document error resolutions - making it easier for teams to understand why changes were made across your systems.

New copy stack trace button for Crash Reporting

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 03:30:00 +0000

We’ve added a handy button to copy the stack trace of an error instance straight from Raygun Crash Reporting. Paste it into your AI tool of choice and troubleshoot faster.

New URL tester for Real User Monitoring's path segment rules

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 03:30:00 +0000

We’re rolling out a new URL tester in Real User Monitoring. See exactly how your rules will group pages without waiting for real user data.

Raygun's Christmas Bug Bashapalooza

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 03:30:00 +0000

The Raygun team has been working hard, tackling bugs left and right in the Christmas Bug Bashapalooza.

New NOT operators for Raygun Alerting filters

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 03:30:00 +0000

We’ve added two new NOT operators to filters in Raygun Alerting that allow you to set up alerts that trigger when events don’t match specific criteria.

New API endpoints for deployments

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 03:30:00 +0000

We’ve just rolled out three new Raygun API endpoints for deployments! These let you grab the latest deployment and fetch error groups tied to a specific deployment.

.NET error grouper V8

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 03:30:00 +0000

The .NET Grouper V8 is an enhanced error grouping feature in Raygun that groups errors by their underlying cause rather than just their message. This improvement specifically benefits .NET developers by providing more accurate and meaningful error groupings, addressing the limitations of previous versions.

Auto-provisioning support for SAML SSO

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 03:30:00 +0000

We’re introducing auto-provisioning for organizations using SAML SSO to access Raygun. Now, users can log in to their organization’s Raygun account through SAML SSO without manually creating or linking a Raygun account to their identity provider.

Split your projects in Azure DevOps

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 03:30:00 +0000

Our Azure DevOps integration now supports separate projects for tracking work items. This means you can keep your source code and work items in different projects while still making full use of the Raygun integration.

New API endpoint to delete all source maps

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 03:30:00 +0000

We’re upgrading our API to allow you to delete all source maps in one go similar to older versions of our API.

New host filter for Real User Monitoring

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 17:00:00 +0000

We’re adding a new filter called Host to Real User Monitoring that separates events by URL, letting you compare performance and user experience across your websites.

API update: Manage source maps

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 03:30:00 +0000

We’re thrilled to announce the latest endpoints for the Raygun API - Source maps. This new release allows developers to efficiently add or remove their sourcemaps, with increased flexibility and control over their Raygun platform.

Why modern incident management needs a proactive approach

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 02:00:00 +0000

Incident management is an ever-present challenge in the tech industry. Whether you’re running a small startup or a massive enterprise, dealing with incidents effectively can be the difference between retaining customer trust and losing it. In a recent Founder & Friends podcast episode between Raygun CEO John-Daniel Trask (JD) and Birol Yildiz, the Co-founder and CEO of iLert, they explored how iLert’s approach to alerting and incident management is helping companies stay ahead.

3 Raygun tips to keep your e-commerce site in peak shape this holiday season

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 14:53:10 +1300

The holiday season is here, and with it comes the yearly surge in online shopping traffic. If you’re a software developer working for an e-commerce company, you’re likely gearing up for the busiest time of the year. Keeping your application smooth, fast, and error-free during this high-pressure period is essential to ensuring a stellar customer experience.

Luckily, if you’re already using Raygun, you’ve got the tools to stay on top of it all! To help you be prepared, we’ve compiled three practical tips for using Raygun to keep your site running like clockwork—no matter how many shoppers hit your platform. If you are not a Raygun customer, here is how Raygun can help you get on top of critical software issues during the silly season.

Announcing self-serve SAML SSO: take control of your team’s authentication

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 10:19:45 +1300

Managing user authentication and security for your team just got a serious upgrade. Raygun now offers self-serve security assertion markup language (SAML) single sign-on (SSO) — making it easier than ever to centralize and secure access to your Raygun account.

SAML SSO is now available for all customers. If you’re on a Business or Enterprise plan, we offer this feature at no additional cost. On other plans? No problem—you can add SAML SSO for just $50/month.

How Appwrite integrated Raygun for bulletproof error reporting: lessons learned

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 09:50:45 +1300

This guest post comes from Appwrite, an open-source backend-as-a-service platform helping developers build secure apps faster. Appwrite chose Raygun’s API for direct, lightweight error reporting that avoids SDK bloat and dependency risks. In this post, they share their journey integrating Raygun, the challenges they tackled, and the impact on their production environment. We’re excited to share these insights from the Appwrite team!

Error reporting is essential for production applications that take quality seriously. In Appwrite’s early stages, we already knew the importance of a reliable error reporting system. Let’s see what we learned when we integrated Raygun into Appwrite, what issues we faced, and what we learned along the way.

Stress-free production deployments: Overcoming high-complexity upgrades with Raygun

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 09:00:00 +1300

This guest post comes from Mojmir Fendek, an experienced PHP developer at Silverstripe and a long-time Raygun user. Mojmir demonstrates how Raygun enhances the upgrade process for complex websites, using a Silverstripe CMS example. Raygun is proud to highlight this guide from Silverstripe, offering valuable insights for teams facing similar upgrade challenges across platforms.

The challenge of managing complex web app upgrades

We live in an interconnected world which is often reflected in the complexity of websites. The need to share information in an efficient manner has led to a complex network of dependencies. This comes with many advantages but also many challenges.

Raygun's new SDK for .NET Blazor makes error monitoring easy

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 09:00:00 +1300

.NET Blazor, a robust web development framework, offers developers the unique opportunity to build interactive web applications using C#, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that can run on the server, on the user’s browser, or even as a mobile application when part of a .NET MAUI application. Its unique approach differentiates Blazor from traditional web development methods.

Leveraging our experience with Raygun’s .NET providers (ASP.NET, .NET MAUI, Xamarin, and more), we have created a new Raygun provider optimized for Blazor’s unique environment. It offers the same reliable functionality you expect from a Raygun Crash Reporting provider, from capturing unhandled exceptions to attaching relevant user and system information to crash reports.

The future of .NET for cross-platform development with .NET MAUI and Blazor

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +1300

The .NET ecosystem rapidly evolves, equipping developers with the latest tools and frameworks for cross-platform application development. In a recent Founder & Friends podcast episode, “Everything .NET,” Raygun CEO John Daniel Trask (JD) and Microsoft Principal Program Manager James Montemagno explored the present and future of cross-platform development, highlighting Microsoft’s pivotal role in shaping the direction of this rapidly evolving field.

This article summarizes key insights from JD and James’ conversation, offering .NET developers a glimpse into the future of cross-platform mobile development within the .NET ecosystem.

Cross-platform mobile development with Uno Platform

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +1300

Xamarin has been a popular choice for cross-platform mobile development, but Microsoft’s shift to .NET MAUI has developers seeking alternatives. Uno Platform is an open-source .NET framework for building apps across mobile, desktop, web, and embedded devices.

Raygun CEO John-Daniel Trask interviewed Uno Platform’s Francois Tanguay and Sasha Krsmanovic on a recent Founder & Friends podcast. They discussed Uno Platform’s advantages over Xamarin and its productivity benefits.

This article summarizes their key insights for software developers and explains why the Uno Platform is a strong alternative for developers expanding their cross-platform capabilities.

Seamless error monitoring with Spring Boot and Raygun

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +1300

Learn how Midtrans, a leading payment gateway in Southeast Asia, standardized Raygun error monitoring across their applications with a custom Spring Boot starter, now available as an open-source library.

Responsible engineering prevents costly failures in a scaling world

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +1300

Here at Raygun, we are committed to providing awesome digital experiences. Technology can transform the digital world, just like the physical one, for the people’s benefit. We believe responsible engineering drives this transformation, which we summarize as follows:

Quality: Following good engineering principles.
Autonomy: Giving engineers autonomy to design the best possible solutions.
Support: Expertly supporting engineers and their teams, especially when incidents occur.

In this article, we demonstrate how these core principles—which we all share at Raygun—have informed the design of our tools. Software tools enable engineers to assure the quality of their evolving products, and ultimately support seamless digital experiences for end users.

Top 6 JavaScript errors and how developers can fix them

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +1300

JavaScript errors are every developer’s nightmare. They’re not just irritating—they can stop your project dead in its tracks. And let’s face it, whether you’re a seasoned pro or just getting started, you’re bound to encounter these mistakes. But why keep tripping over the same issues?

At Raygun, we’ve seen it all when it comes to JavaScript errors, and we know which ones are the real time-wasters. In this guide, we’re not just listing them—we’re tackling the six most common JavaScript errors head-on. We’ll break down what causes them, how to spot them, and most importantly, how to fix them.

API update: Metrics

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 09:00:00 +1300

We recently released two new Raygun API endpoints that expose time series aggregations for particular metrics. They enable you to consolidate your company’s metrics into an external dashboard (such as Grafana, Tableau, or PowerBI), correlate errors and page performance with data points that Raygun cannot see, or even perform advanced data analysis.

Currently, we have two metric categories available: those that pertain to pages (relevant for Real User Monitoring) and those that pertain to errors (relevant for Crash Reporting).

Benchmarking OpenAI models for automated error resolution

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 09:00:00 +1300

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly shaping the future of software development, offering new possibilities in code generation, debugging, and error resolution. Recent advancements in these AI-driven tools have prompted a closer examination of their practical applications and potential impact on developer workflows.

This article explores the effectiveness of LLMs in software development, with a particular focus on error resolution. Drawing from industry-wide observations and insights gained through my work with AI Error Resolution at Raygun, I’ll analyze LLMs’ current capabilities and their implications for the future of development practices. The discussion will weigh both the promising advancements and the challenges that arise as these technologies integrate into our daily work.

2.5X faster and 88% cheaper error resolution with GPT-4o mini and Raygun

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +1300

In May, OpenAI released GPT-4o, which refined the GPT-4 architecture with native multi-modal input support, faster speeds, and a lower price per token. GPT-4o mini was released this week, making it even more cost-effective and quicker. This model is considered better than GPT-3.5 Turbo, being faster and smarter—a win all around.

Let’s test it in a real-world application to see how useful it is for software developers.

Unparalleled speed

Our testing revealed that GPT-4o mini operates at an impressive speed, immediately standing out in its efficiency. We timed the response time using Raygun’s AI Error Resolution feature and compared it to the GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 Turbo models. The difference was like night and day, with the GPT-4o mini being nearly 2 to 2.5 times faster than the GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo. Even when compared to its bigger brother, GPT-4o, and its predecessor, GPT-3.5 Turbo, the GPT-4o mini was slightly faster. However, some reports suggest it should be much quicker, indicating potential bottlenecks somewhere.

Seamless two-way JIRA and Raygun integration

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 09:08:09 +1300

At Raygun, we understand the importance of an automated development workflow for quick bug fixes. That’s why we’re excited to announce the enhanced JIRA and Raygun integration.

Keeping up with JIRA

Since its inception in 2016, the JIRA and Raygun integration has been one of our most popular. Initially, it provided one-way synchronization, reflecting JIRA ticket status in Raygun error groups. However, we’re pleased to introduce two-way synchronization, making error management and status updates even more efficient.

Effortless error monitoring for Adobe Commerce: Introducing the free Magenizr Raygun module

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 09:17:09 +1300

This guest post comes from long-time Raygun customer Magenizr, a web development agency specializing in Magento modules for e-commerce brands and developers. They’ve created a free Magento module that leverages Raygun to monitor errors and performance issues in Magento-based shops. Raygun is excited to promote this new plug-and-play Magento module from our friends Tobias Forkel and his team at Magenizr.

At Magenizr, we’re always looking for tools to make life easier for developers and merchants. Not too long ago, we found ourselves in a bind. We were scouring the Adobe Commerce Marketplace and Github repositories for an error monitoring app tailored for e-commerce shops but came up empty-handed. New Relic was overkill for shops that just needed to pinpoint where errors were cropping up.

Raygun4Net update: Portable PDBs and offline storage

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 09:17:09 +1300

We’re excited to roll out support for Portable PDBs and offline error storage in Raygun4Net 11.0.0. In this article, we’ll break down these features and how they can enhance your error identification and debugging process.

Ever seen an error in Raygun but missing the file and line number in the stack trace? This happens when debug symbols aren’t available at runtime. With Portable PDB support, this issue is resolved. Just upload your symbols to Raygun, and we’ll enrich your stack traces with these missing details.

Enhancing Aspire with AI: integrating Ollama for local error resolution

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 09:17:09 +1300

In this article, we’ll explore how we developed an Aspire component that spins up an Ollama container and downloads a Large Language Model, ready for use. If you’re new to any of these technologies, you can continue reading, otherwise feel free to skip to the technical walkthrough.

As a quick bit of background, we recently released an Aspire component that brings a free, lightweight Raygun app into your local development environment to help debug exceptions. We then subsequently enhanced this with AI Error Resolution capabilities which runs entirely on your local machine.

Introducing Raygun AI Error Resolution for Aspire

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 09:17:09 +1300

Last month, we rolled out Raygun4Aspire, our Crash Reporting client for .NET Aspire applications. That release included a free, lightweight version of the full Raygun web app that runs locally. After the successful launch of our recent AI Error Resolution feature for Crash Reporting, we knew that we had to bring this feature into the Aspire local development experience.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that AI Error Resolution for Raygun4Aspire is now available for all Aspire app developers! This feature uses a locally running Ollama container hosting a Llama3 model to analyze your exception reports.

Welcoming Scott Hanselman to Raygun’s Board

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 09:13:09 +1300

I’m proud to announce that prominent software industry veteran, Scott Hanselman, has joined the Raygun Board of Directors. We’re really fortunate to add Scott’s voice to our strategic decision-making, drawing from his unique expertise in building community and loyalty around technology.

Scott shared one of the reasons why he joined the Raygun board:

“I love that JD (Raygun’s CEO) uses the word ‘delight’, because that’s the language that gets me excited. We want to be delighting our customers and making their lives better. As a board member, I want to provide value and make Raygun even better than it already is."

API update: Sessions, pages and Customers

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 09:17:09 +1300

Today, we’re excited to roll out 6 new endpoints for the Raygun API, making it simpler than ever to query Sessions, Pages, and Customers.

Raygun’s Real User Monitoring helps you track and enhance your front-end and mobile page speed performance. It analyzes user sessions and page views to calculate your overall page speed. Previously, this required someone to log into Raygun, find the right application, and manually inspect sessions and page views in Real User Monitoring.

Xamarin alternatives for cross-platform mobile development

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 09:13:09 +1300

Xamarin is now officially sunset, leaving many developers seeking other options for cross-platform mobile development. If you’re one of them, don’t panic. While Microsoft themselves have shifted towards .NET MAUI, it’s not the only option – there are several robust frameworks that can match Xamarin’s capabilities, and even introduce exciting new features and efficiencies.

Let’s look at some leading alternatives to keep your mobile projects thriving.

1. .NET MAUI: The natural successor

.NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) is the direct successor to Xamarin, designed by Microsoft to streamline and enhance the Xamarin environment. .NET MAUI simplifies the development process by integrating directly with .NET 6 and beyond, offering a more unified approach to building mobile and desktop applications. If you’re already familiar with Xamarin, transitioning to .NET MAUI will be a breeze, as it retains much of Xamarin’s design philosophy while offering improved performance and a more robust development experience.

Life beyond Xamarin - the future of mobile development

Thu, 30 May 2024 09:00:00 +1300

In the latest Founder & Friends episode, Raygun CEO John-Daniel Trask (JD) sat down with Matthew Richardson, the Director at Velocity Engineering Systems, to discuss the future of cross-platform mobile development.

This article summarizes their key insights for software developers considering a move away from Xamarin.

The discussion covers four main alternatives:

We’ll explore the pros and cons of each option, focusing on:

AI engineering for AI Error Resolution

Wed, 22 May 2024 09:13:09 +1300

Smart engineering teams are working out how to use Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve real business problems. At Raygun, we’re no exception, and we’re committing our time and effort to developing AI software applications that bring value to our customers.

Our first AI-powered release is AI Error Resolution (AIER), a novel Crash Reporting feature that takes debugging with ChatGPT to the next level.

We know that LLMs have already dramatically increased software engineers’ productivity. However, unless these tools are integrated into your workflow, you waste critical time explaining the details in your prompt—especially when the alarms are sounding at 3 a.m.!

MAUI provider upgrades v2: Real User Monitoring + Crash Reporting

Mon, 06 May 2024 09:13:09 +1300

I’ve written previously about the process of adding Real User Monitoring capabilities to our MAUI provider. I’m excited to say that this work is now live, batteries and all, plus some more improvements since the last blog.

To recap the state of cross-platform development in the .NET ecosystem, Xamarin is out of support as of May 1st! This is replaced by .NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI), meaning developers need appropriate tools when they make the switch. Raygun has done a huge revamp of our MAUI provider to make sure we’re prepared to support our users, upgrading our provider for Crash Reporting alongside some extra refinements to the new Real User Monitoring provider.

Raygun4Aspire: (Free) lightweight Crash Reporting running locally

Mon, 06 May 2024 09:13:09 +1300

NET Aspire is a new type of project and set of NuGet packages that make it easier to coordinate the multiple moving parts of a cloud-native web application. Announced near the end of 2023, .NET Aspire is currently in Preview 6, so still a work in progress.

We’ve just released Raygun4Aspire, our Crash Reporting client for Aspire applications. This is a bit different from other Raygun clients, as it comes with a lightweight Raygun web app that runs locally, so you can view nicely presented crash reports for issues occurring in your local development environment.

Announcing AI Error Resolution

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 09:13:09 +1300

After months of anticipation (and invaluable input from our beta testers!) we’re so excited to officially share AI Error Resolution. We can say firsthand that this tool helps developers resolve issues with renewed speed and accuracy, using AI-powered suggestions on the root cause of errors and how to fix them. Testing has shown how effectively this feature can pinpoint the source of an error and produce the most efficient method to resolve it, accelerating the entire debugging process.

C# logging: Best practices in 2023 with examples and tools

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 09:17:09 +1300

Monitoring applications that you’ve deployed to production is non-negotiable if you want to be confident in your code quality. One of the best ways to monitor application behavior is by emitting, saving, and indexing log data. Logs can be sent to a variety of applications for indexing, and you can then refer to them when problems arise.

Knowing which tools to use and how to write logging code makes logging far more effective in monitoring applications and diagnosing failures. The Twelve Factor-App methodology, which advocates for the importance of logging, has gained popularity as a set of guidelines for building modern software-as-a-service. According to the twelve-factor app methodology, log data should be treated as an event stream. Streams of data are sent as a sort of “broadcast” to listeners, without taking into account what will happen to the data that is received. According to the twelve-factor logging method:

AI realism (part two)

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 09:13:09 +1300

Emotions are running high about AI technologies. In this 2-parter, I do my best to make a rational case for the state of AI, and how we can respond to it. This is the second part; catch up with part one here.

Today, we’ll talk about developing a company culture that thrives on experimentation and unpredictability. I’ll describe the conditions that can keep a product company nimble and healthy during a period of rapid change, enabling it to take advantage of emerging technologies.

How Core Web Vitals create business impact

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 09:17:09 +1300

What are Core Web Vitals, and why should you care? Let’s power through the essentials of these metrics and how they impact CX and $$$. This is written with the busy software executive in mind, so we’re sticking to a clear, big-picture view of the metrics, user experience and revenue.

Want more? Grab our complete, definitive guide to implementing and harnessing Core Web Vitals here.

If you’ve heard about Core Web Vitals, it’s likely been in the form of a stick: something Google is enforcing that can hurt your search engine visibility. We’re here to talk about the carrot, giving a quick explainer of Core Web Vitals, and how they can help you connect with customers and drive lasting innovation.

AI realism (part one)

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 09:13:09 +1300

Emotions are running high about AI technologies. In this 2-parter, I do my best to make a rational case on the reality of AI, and how we can respond to it. This is part one; part two next week.

We seem to be struggling to have pragmatic discussions about advancements in Artificial Intelligence. It’s hard to hear calmer voices over the detractors and breathless enthusiasts. Today, I want to make a reasoned, evidence-based case for the potential of this technology, glance at present and future applications, and offer some practical examples for implementing AI within an organization.

How to decide between cloud and on-premise monitoring

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 08:00:00 +1200

Application performance monitoring systems tend to be available in two modes: on-premise and cloud-based SaaS. Which is the “right” choice? Well, it depends on your situation, but overall cloud-based SaaS offerings have significant benefits when compared to on-premise.

However, it’s not always so simple. The right selection depends on the facts on the ground.

Using my experience working for a large-scale cloud solutions department, I’ve put together some key things you’ll want to consider before you make a decision, starting with some benefits and challenges.

RIP Xamarin: Adding .NET MAUI to Real User Monitoring

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 09:13:09 +1300

We’re constantly seeing frameworks evolving and churning, and in May 2024 we’ll see the end of Xamarin after 12 years. The deprecation of Xamarin means we need to ensure that MAUI is equipped with the tools and functionalities that developers have come to rely on Xamarin for. At Raygun, that’s Real User Monitoring (RUM). To prepare for this shift, I’ve been working on the integration of RUM for our Raygun4Maui provider, offering features like page tracking, session insights, custom and native timings, and network timings, alongside vital stability improvements.

Error monitoring and exception handling in large-scale software projects

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 01:47:42 +0000

Large-scale software projects don’t care how many unit tests you put into your code. Or how sophisticated your CI/CD pipeline is. Or how robustly you run blue-green deployments to ease into newly-deployed code. These projects will eventually find themselves subjected to your users, who will uncover bugs your team didn’t catch and didn’t even think to test for.

Large software systems are simply too complex to be bug-free, and you can’t test for all of the different ways your users will interact with your application. That’s not to minimize the importance of robust testing suites — they’re invaluable for catching major bugs in mission-critical applications or infrastructure — but rather that your software development lifecycle should also take error monitoring into account.

How to measure and improve Node.js performance

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 09:13:09 +1300

Change is the only constant in software, and few languages change like JavaScript. In just the last few years, we’ve had the rise of TypeScript and React, dozens of new frameworks, and Node.js has brought us over to the server-side. Google’s V8, which powers Node.js, is one of the fastest JavaScript engines in existence. In simple benchmarks, well-optimized JS executed by V8 often performs almost at the same speeds as famously fast languages like C++.

How to improve INP (the newest Core Web Vital)

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 09:13:09 +1300

From the first introduction of Core Web Vitals, Google has maintained that these user experience metrics will keep evolving. Since 2022, the Google team has been testing Interaction to Next Paint (INP), a new interactivity metric, and asking for feedback from the development community. Late in 2023, they announced that INP would replace FID as a Core Web Vital.

The transition to INP is effective from March 2024. Instead of optimizing for the first interaction (as required by First Input Delay), Interaction to Next Paint will require teams to optimize interactivity overall, measuring all interactions throughout a page view. We get into what that means, and what you can do, below.

JS Toolbox 2024: Bundlers and Test Frameworks

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 09:13:09 +1300

JavaScript is bigger than ever, and the ecosystem is nothing short of overwhelming. In this JS toolbox 2024 series, we’ve selected and analyzed the most noteworthy JS tools, so that you don’t have to.

In part 1 of this series, we explored the foundations of any JavaScript project: Runtime environments and package management. In part 2, we focused on JavaScript frameworks and static site generators. Now, in part 3, we turn our attention to the tools that refine and optimize the development process: Bundlers and test frameworks.

JS Toolbox 2024: Frameworks and static site generators

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 09:13:09 +1300

In 2024, JavaScript is bigger than ever. The ecosystem is just as huge, and almost impossible to keep track of, so I’ve had a go at picking out 2024’s most essential JS tools for you.

In part 1 of this series, we reviewed runtimes and package managers, the foundational building blocks of your software project. So in part 2, we’re analyzing the tools which form the walls and roof that give your software project its structure: frameworks and static site generators.

JS Toolbox 2024: Runtime environments & package management

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 09:13:09 +1300

Just as any durable structure needs a solid foundation, successful JavaScript projects rely heavily on starting with the right tools.

This post, the first in our JS Toolbox 2024 series, explores the core pillars of the JavaScript & TypeScript ecosystem: Runtime environments, package management, and development servers.

15 best iOS crash reporting tools for 2023

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 10:45:44 +1300

Picking the best iOS crash reporting tools available in 2024 is a tall order. The market continues to get competitive, and a best-in-breed tool needs to monitor crashes, generate crash reports, filter and group errors, plus any other features that matter to your team.

In this article, we’ve collected the 15 best iOS crash reporting tools to help you make the right decision for your particular requirements. The options we’ve listed can help you catch errors in real time, identify patterns, and fix bugs before they affect your customers.

JS Toolbox 2024: Essential picks for modern developers (Overview)

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 09:13:09 +1300

Introducing JS Toolbox 2024

Staying ahead of the curve in JavaScript development requires keeping on top of the ever-evolving landscape of tools and technologies. As we head into 2024, the sprawling world of JavaScript development tools will continue to transform, offering more refined, efficient, and user-friendly options.

This series, JS Toolbox 2024, is your one-stop for a comprehensive overview of the latest and most impactful tools in the JavaScript ecosystem.

JavaScript unit testing frameworks in 2024: A comparison

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 08:00:00 +1300

Choosing a JavaScript unit testing framework is an essential early step for any new front-end development project.

Unit tests are great for peace of mind and reducing software errors. You should always make the time to test.

But which framework should you choose for your project? We examined 11 of the most popular JavaScript unit testing frameworks according to stateofjs.com, to help you decide which is best for you.

Stateofjs collects data from thousands of front-end developers in its annual surveys. Here’s their ranking of the most popular JS testing frameworks, sorted by their usage. We’ll go over them one by one, and try to understand their pros and cons.

10 best error monitoring tools: A comparison report

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 00:09:00 +1200

Software powers the entire modern world, and behind it are millions of developers on thousands of teams, armed with the tools to ship better software, faster. Today, we look at just one of these developer tools – reviewing the top 10 error monitoring tools on the market to help you find the best solution for you and your team. Fortunately, it’s a competitive market, with plenty of innovative companies providing more powerful tools than ever before, all designed to make your life easier.

3 secure ways to handle user data in Raygun

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 09:13:09 +1300

You know the feeling: You’re right in the middle of cracking a really convoluted coding problem, when an urgent support ticket pops up. It’s not just any ticket; it’s from a VIP customer with a high-severity issue demanding resolution within an hour. You have to drop what you’re doing and scramble, completely context-switching and losing all your momentum.

Often, the biggest challenge in these situations is recreating the exact issue reported by the user. Support tickets lack detail about the user’s setup, making it akin to finding a needle in a haystack of monitoring data. You’re also relying on the customer’s memories, leading to inaccurate or technically imprecise descriptions. Even trickier, some monitoring tools may hinder data retrieval due to sampling and retention policies.

Improving API error responses with the Result pattern

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 09:13:09 +1300

In the expanding world of APIs, meaningful error responses can be just as important as well-structured success responses. In this post, I’ll take you through some of the different options for creating responses that I’ve encountered during my time working at Raygun. We’ll go over the pros and cons of some common options, and end with what I consider to be one of the best choices when it comes to API design, the Result Pattern. This pattern can lead to an API that will cleanly handle error states and easily allow for consistent future endpoint development. It has been particularly useful to me while developing the recently released Raygun API Project, where it has allowed for faster development of endpoints by simplifying the code needed to handle error states.

Ensuring software quality with integration testing

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 09:13:09 +1300

Before the Raygun API limited release last year, we’d been consistently receiving requests for a public API for a long time, to provide a way for our customers to access their Raygun data programmatically. We’re now proud to say we’re providing a public API with a range of endpoints, but it took us a lot of planning and development to get here!

In this post, I’d like to take you back to the beginning of development on our big API project. Specifically, I want to walk through the pivotal decisions we made around testing when we started development on the project, and how (and why) these have paid off.

The art of software engineering management

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 09:13:09 +1300

Like any leadership role, leading an engineering team in a mature, compact company like Raygun comes with both honor and responsibility. Leading a major development project is a bit like conducting a symphony orchestra, where every individual plays a crucial role and has a great impact on the work they release to customers and end-users.

However, there are plenty of real-world examples of what not to do, too. In 2010, the tech world buzzed with controversy as Apple’s newly released iPhone 4 faced widespread reception issues, later dubbed ‘Antennagate’. Customers found that holding the device in a certain way degraded the signal strength, leading to dropped calls. Engineers had identified potential antenna issues during the design phase, but the design was pushed forward. Apple’s eventual response was to offer free cases to mitigate the problem and a commitment to address the design flaw. This engineering failure underscores that success in the tech industry isn’t solely about cutting-edge innovation; it’s about meticulous coordination and direction. Mature companies, having navigated the challenges of rapid technological evolution for years, (should) grasp this.

Mocha vs Jasmine, Chai, Sinon & Cucumber in 2024

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 09:17:09 +1300

Javascript has been enabling browsers for years, and for better or for worse, the internet is made of JS. NodeJS brought it to the server side. TypeScript has wrapped familiar object-oriented, statically-typed syntax around it. Anywhere you look, you’ll find Javascript: on the client, server, mobile, and embedded systems.

All good software must be tested, and software written in Javascript is no exception (pun intended.) The JS ecosystem is huge, so there are a LOT of Javascript test frameworks are available. They variously offer features like:

Transitioning from lz4net to K4os.Compression.LZ4

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 09:13:09 +1300

At Raygun, we’re processing billions of events per month for our customers, so it’s well worthwhile looking for the most efficient data storage solutions. Way back when we started out, we chose lz4net to store data, which served our purposes well for many years. As we grew, though, we realized this was getting expensive, and was starting to undermine our business model. This post is focused on how we made the switch to the K4os.Compression.LZ4 rewrite, attaining significant performance gains. It’s also about the challenges we encountered along the way (namely, the discovery that our performance gains were absent in the Legacy library, and we needed to support 2 decompression implementations!)

Best practices for writing clean, maintainable JavaScript

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:09:00 +1200

The world’s biggest language comes with a huge collection of conventions and guidelines from the community’s collective wisdom. Following JavaScript best practices can help achieve faster page loads and better performance, improve code readability, and make maintenance and debugging easier. Carefully crafted code can also prevent errors and security issues, especially if it’s complemented with real-time diagnostic tools such as JavaScript error monitoring.

In this article, we’ll look into a selection of JavaScript best practices that you can use in frontend development.

Fight engineer overwhelm with effective exception monitoring

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 02:37:14 +0000

Customers want applications that solve real world problems, executives are calling for engineers to do more with less, and competition is brutal at every level. Even as pressure mounts to ship new features faster, we can’t lose sight of people and processes that are focused on quality. Especially given that the elephant in the room, technical debt, currently stands at $1.52 trillion in the US alone, according to the most recent CISQ report.

Proactive error management: Collaborate effectively and work smarter with tags

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 09:13:09 +1300

Talking to many of our customers with different needs and use cases, one particular issue comes up all the time.

When I’m seeing so many error groups in my app and so many error notifications in my inbox every day, it’s easy to end up feeling overwhelmed. I want a more proactive system to alert me to which errors need attention and when, so that I can stop getting buried.

Symbolicating stack traces from Apple system libraries

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 09:13:09 +1300

In the world of software development, quickly finding and fixing errors drives better experiences for both end-users and developers. One key tool in this process is the symbol map, which records debugging information that was lost in the compilation process. Symbol maps (or source maps if we’re talking JavaScript) connect the code developers write to the minified code in production, making it easier to decipher crashes by pinpointing the exact source code that caused the error. This very same concept of symbol mapping for “symbolication”—the term we use to refer to the process of mapping back to source code—is used by nearly every language. This includes Apple’s Objective-C and Swift, which are used to develop native software for Apple devices.

Taking down (and restoring) the Raygun ingestion API

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 09:13:09 +1300

In a world where Software as a Service (SaaS) products are integral to daily life, maintaining uninterrupted service for end-users is paramount. However, stuff happens. When it does, our most valuable response (other than restoring service ASAP) is to review the series of events that led up to the incident and learn from them.

On August 25th, 2023, at 7:02 AM NZT, Raygun experienced a significant incident that impacted our API ingestion cluster, leading to an outage lasting approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes. While this wasn’t fun for anyone involved, this incident did prove to be a valuable learning experience, shedding light on the importance of infrastructure management and resilience.

Adding a CDN to a load balancer (for a much faster website)

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 09:13:09 +1300

Here at Raygun, we like to go fast. Really fast. That’s what we do! When we see something that isn’t zooming, we try to figure out how to make it go faster. So today, we’re answering a simple (and relevant) question; how do we make our public site, raygun.com, much, much faster?

The answer, at first glance, is simple—we build it into a Content Delivery Network (CDN). But what if you have a load balancer serving your website, and you don’t want to rebuild everything to serve from a CDN? Well, that’s more complicated.

The top web performance killers and how to prevent them

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 21:00:12 +0000

Loading speeds of websites will always be a tricky thing to manage. They depend on anything and everything from your user’s choice of device to the server hardware your site runs on.

However, there’s a lot that you can control. There’s a range of established web performance killers that you can and should avoid as you develop your web page. Removing as many of these barriers as possible is critical if you want your website to load smoothly and quickly for the majority of your users. Here are some suggestions for streamlining everything within your control to allow for the fastest possible load times.

The hidden impact of cache locality on application performance

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 09:13:09 +1300

Author & Affiliations

Dr. Panos Patros, CPEng

Principal Engineer, Raygun, New Zealand
Adjunct Professor in Computer Science, IBM Center of Advanced Studies-Atlantic, UNB, Canada
Steering Committee Member, IT Engineers, Engineering New Zealand

My favorite technical experience from grad school was all the cool ways we were trying to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the IBM JVM (now called Eclipse OMR). The majority of such optimizations required an intricate understanding of how CPUs and memories look under the hood. But why is there such an impressive performance gain in padding objects with blank space to the closest multiple of 64 bytes and ensuring they always start at addresses that are exactly divisible with 64?

Using a possibility tree for fast string parsing

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 09:13:09 +1300

The Raygun ingestion pipeline is kept pretty busy processing over 90 million crash reports every day. So needless to say, we need the processing pipeline to be as efficient as possible to reduce resource usage and avoid costly scaling.

One of the many operations during processing is to parse a user-agent string (UA string) wherever one is present. We’ve gone through several rounds of performance optimizations over the years, and during one of these rounds, the user-agent parser had stuck out as the slowest component. From the UA string, we determine the operating system, browser, device, and their versions (throughout this post, I’ll sometimes refer to all 3 of these things as “products”). This information is used for indexing, so that Raygun users can filter their crash reports by these dimensions.

Why every developer needs to learn about source maps (right now)

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 09:13:09 +1300

You did it! Sure, it might be four weeks overdue and late on a Friday, but you’ve finally finished deploying a long-awaited update to the web app. However, your celebrations are cut short as your phone vibrates off the table. Picking it up, you’re confronted with a developer’s worst nightmare. You’re getting flooded with messages that the login is no longer working. Was it your deployment? This is bad. Nobody can use the site if they can’t log in.

Introducing Error Groups to the Raygun API

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 09:17:09 +1300

We’re excited to announce an important extension to our API. After rigorous research, testing, and feedback, we’ve launched the Error Groups endpoints. This powerful new addition aims to enhance your monitoring experience and better handle errors across your applications.

Better CI/CD with GitHub Actions and deployment tracking

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 09:13:09 +1300

Understanding the impact of each of your deployments is crucial, especially as they become increasingly frequent. Chances are, your team is either aiming to increase shipping velocity or has already started deploying “continuously” (which is to say, multiple times a day). The biggest tech teams at the likes of Amazon and Google deploy thousands of times daily, and Atlassian has found that 75% of enterprise DevOps teams call deployment frequency their most important success criteria. And while CD comes with a host of well-established benefits, it also introduces a heightened risk of introducing new errors and issues.

Part two: 7 must-know object-oriented software patterns (and their pitfalls)

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 09:13:09 +1300

Author & Affiliations

Dr. Panos Patros, CPEng

Principal Engineer, Raygun
Adjunct Professor in Computer Science, IBM Center of Advanced Studies-Atlantic, UNB, Canada
Steering Committee Member, IT Engineers, Engineering New Zealand

This is the second and final part in our exploration of must-know OOP patterns, and covers the composite bridge pattern, iterator pattern, and lock design pattern. Find part one here covering extension, singleton, exception shielding and object pool patterns.

Java debugging tools you should know

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 09:17:09 +1300

In an ideal world, bugs would never reach production. But software errors are an inevitable part of a developer’s life. Java debugging tools exist to help us resolve errors faster, so we can get on with doing what we do best.

This list of Java debugging tools will help you evaluate your options quickly so you can find the best for the job.

Find and fix Java errors, exceptions, bugs & crashes with ease. Raygun captures every crash and reports in real time

[Learn more and try Raygun Crash Reporting free for 14 days.](https://raygun.com/platform/crash-reporting)

1. Raygun Crash Reporting

New Raygun JS provider v2.27.0 to support performance timing

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 09:13:09 +1300

Deprecation of `Performance.timing` in browsers: New Raygun JS provider v2.27.0 for compatibility

The popular chromium based browser ecosystem has recently changed how performance metrics can be collected in relation to performance.timing.

Before we get into the details, the TLDR is: if you use the Raygun CDN for raygun4js, you’re up to date. If you self-host raygun4js and use Raygun Real User Monitoring, you’ll want to upgrade to version 2.27.0.

What was deprecated?

Window.performance.timing.

Part one: 7 must-know object-oriented software patterns (and their pitfalls)

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 09:13:09 +1300

Author & Affiliations

Dr. Panos Patros, CPEng

Principal Engineer, Raygun
Adjunct Professor in Computer Science, IBM Center of Advanced Studies-Atlantic, UNB, Canada
Steering Committee Member, IT Engineers, Engineering New Zealand

The importance of object-oriented design patterns in software development

Object-oriented (not orientated!) design is a fundamental principle of modern software engineering, a crucial concept that every developer needs to understand and employ effectively. Software design patterns like object-oriented design serve as universal solutions to common problems, across a range of instances and domains. As software engineers advance in their careers, they actually often start using these patterns instinctively, even without knowing it.

A guide to single-page application performance

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 09:13:09 +1300

Many of us have heard single-page applications (SPAs) hailed as the future of web applications. Proponents of SPAs point to increased code reusability and development velocity, and the advantage SPAs can give when it comes to delivering a fast and seamless user experience. Massive sites like Facebook, AirBnB and Trello are all built as SPAs.

On the flipside, monitoring SPAs for performance is pretty challenging. Some of the biggest headaches are choosing the most helpful metrics, gaining visibility into app performance over time, and knowing what metrics you can get from the browser.

Best practices for monitoring cloud-based apps

Fri, 21 Jul 2023 09:17:09 +1300

It’s never been more important to monitor the health of cloud-based systems. According to Gartner, cloud-native platforms will serve as the foundation for 95% of new digital initiatives by 2025. Cloud native is table stakes to keep pace with your competitors, and monitoring your cloud applications is a critical part of that effort. Security risks are up, customer patience is down, and the cloud will be at the center of your revenue stream soon (if it isn’t already).

Best practices for tracing and debugging microservices

Fri, 21 Jul 2023 09:17:09 +1300

Tracing and debugging microservices is one of the biggest challenges this popular software development architecture comes with — probably the most difficult one.

Due to the distributed architecture, it’s not as straightforward as debugging traditional monolithic applications. Instead of using direct debugging methods, you’ll need to rely on logging and monitoring tools, coding practices, specific databases, and other indirect solutions to successfully debug microservices.

In this article, we’ll look into the main differences between microservices and monoliths, see why it is harder to debug microservices, then go through nine best practices that can help you with setting up a proper debugging workflow for your microservices application.

The key to secure transmission: TLS in the Raygun ecosystem

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 09:17:09 +1300

As our lives increasingly move online and data becomes the lifeblood of business, secure data transmission is imperative. From personal conversations to financial transactions, from healthcare records to sensitive business data, nearly everything we do online requires trust that our data is protected. And if you’ve ever made an HTTPS request, TLS is behind it, providing that trust.

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a crucial protocol for establishing online safety. Its function is to secure the information we transmit online, ensuring that it arrives safely at its intended destination. In essence, TLS provides a secure foundation for our online activities, creating a robust pathway for our data as it navigates the vast networks of the internet.

Server performance metrics: 11 to consider for actionable monitoring

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 09:17:09 +1300

With the DevOps movement becoming mainstream, more and more developers are getting involved with the end-to-end delivery of web applications, including deployment, monitoring performance, and maintenance.

As an application gains more users in a production environment, it’s increasingly critical that you understand the role of the server. To determine the health of your applications, you need to gather system performance metrics for the servers running your web applications and optimize your web server performance.

How much could software errors be costing your company?

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 02:32:12 +0000

Errors are an inevitable part of building software. However, while you can’t eradicate them, you can definitely mitigate them and reduce their impact. And the reality is, if you don’t measure, track, or resolve errors, you’re ignoring a loss in revenue.

Once you understand the financial impact of software errors on your company, you can start to prioritize your biggest opportunity costs and catch issues early with methods like smart, early testing and proactive error reporting. Using a few industry averages, you can put a number to the unseen cost of software errors for your team, and start to plug hidden cash leaks like wasted developer time and lost customers.

API update: Manage tracked deployments

Thu, 06 Jul 2023 09:17:09 +1300

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the latest endpoints for the Raygun API – Deployments. This new release allows developers to efficiently manage deployments, with increased flexibility and control over their Raygun platform.

Popular CSS preprocessors with examples: Sass, Less, Stylus and more

Thu, 08 Jun 2023 10:00:09 +1300

As a stylesheet language, CSS has limited capabilities when it comes to writing logic, organizing code, and performing other computational tasks. CSS preprocessors provide a solution to this problem.

While CSS has improved a lot in recent years with the introduction of custom and logical properties, math and color functions, new pseudo-classes, and other enhancements, there are still many good reasons to use CSS preprocessors. They can help with speeding up your workflow, optimizing your code base, improving performance, preparing for scaling, and more.

API update: User invitations

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 09:17:09 +1300

Today, we’re excited to share the latest endpoint release for the Raygun API, user invitations. With this release, customers can now use the API to automate the process of inviting new team members to Raygun.

With unlimited seats included in every Raygun account, one of the best ways to get the most out of Raygun is to add more team members to your plan. Currently, this requires every new team member to be invited manually and added to the correct team, creating a major admin task, especially for larger accounts.

Core Web Vitals e-commerce analysis: part one

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 09:17:09 +1300

Back in 2021, Google introduced Core Web Vitals, three criteria to measure if a website is fast, stable, and responsive enough to give visitors a good digital experience. These factor into search ranking and have a powerful influence on customer behavior. But while Google has been urging the web performance community ever since, many are still falling short.

We pulled data from the Chrome User Experience Report to conduct our own Core Web Vitals analysis, finding that even some of the largest e-commerce brands aren’t passing these thresholds. This is part one — find part two here.

10 Reasons to Use a CSS Preprocessor

Sun, 28 May 2023 10:30:09 +1300

So, you’ve probably heard of CSS preprocessors before, be it Sass, LESS, or Stylus — they’re all great.

Personally, I use SCSS, as I’ve found it really helpful that I could copy and paste my original CSS into an SCSS file and work from there. (SCSS can be written just like plain CSS).

I thought I’d share a couple of reasons why they’re so useful, and why you should give them a try if you haven’t already!

Core Web Vitals update: Adjustments to LCP (and INP)

Tue, 23 May 2023 09:17:09 +1300

Google has shared small but important adjustments to the way LCP is assessed. LCP, or Largest Contentful Paint, measures how quickly a page appears to load from the user’s perspective. More specifically, this is the time for the main content to be painted or the “render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport”. You’ll get a “Good” score when the load time of this content is 2.5 seconds or less. (Need a refresher on the finer details of Core Web Vitals? Check out our Developer’s Guide to learn more).

Common C# exceptions and how to fix them

Mon, 22 May 2023 09:17:09 +1300

C# is a powerful programming language, but like all code, comes with its fair share of errors. Even experienced developers can find themselves stumped when they encounter a strange exception or error code. Fortunately, with the right knowledge and techniques, you can tackle any C# exception.

In this article, we’ll discuss some of the most common exceptions in C# programming and how they can be fixed. Before we get into the nuts and bolts, we’ll give you a brief overview of standard exceptions and their composing parts and also provide tips on how to avoid these errors in the first place.

The 29 best DevOps tools for 2023 and beyond

Fri, 12 May 2023 09:17:09 +1300

The integration of Development and Operations is a powerful innovation in how we build software. If you’re new to DevOps practices, or looking to improve your current processes, it can be tough to know which tool is best for your team.

We’ve put together this list to help you make an informed decision on which tools should be part of your stack. Read on to discover the 29 best DevOps tools, from automated build tools to application performance monitoring platforms.

Ruby performance tips - how to optimize code from the ground up

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 09:17:09 +1300

Over the last few years, more developers have taken Ruby as their staple programming language. Who can blame them? It certainly has a lot of appealing features. For one, the syntax is easy to read and debug. A default MVC architecture within most Ruby frameworks is another big drawcard.

Despite the list of advantages, there’s perhaps an equally lengthy list of cons. Likely the biggest detraction is the low-performance characteristics that every Ruby application shows unless optimized, due to the nature of the language itself (more about that as you read on). Fortunately, there are some Ruby performance tips worth keeping up your sleeve to make it worth the effort.

Java performance optimization tips: How to avoid common pitfalls

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 02:48:42 +0000

In this post, we’ll be delving into Java performance optimization, providing you with essential tips to write faster and more efficient code. If you’re reading this, you’re probably already aware of the importance of performance engineering and the need to optimize your code to ensure speed for all users, but even the most seasoned and performance-aware programmers can get tripped up.

Below, we’ll cover several of the most notorious causes of performance issues in Java programs, including object creation, String operations, looping, and regular expressions. We’ll equip you with the best tips and strategies to optimize around common issues, allowing you to write more efficient programs and avoid common pitfalls that hinder performance.

Debug JavaScript in Mobile Safari (iOS) in 8 easy steps

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 10:00:09 +1300

Debugging JavaScript is an inevitable part of web development, and not the nicest one. Debugging tasks always seem to pop up when you’re already buried under piles of work, and a teammate pings you about an issue that was overlooked in testing and has been causing frustration since your last release.

That’s why it helps to be equipped with the developer tools to help you debug faster.

If you’ve made a mobile-friendly website and something is playing up — let’s say, the submit button of your contact form isn’t working on mobile devices — you don’t have the luxury of just pressing Option + ⌘ + C and looking for the error in the browser console. You need to learn how to debug mobile on desktop!

Debugging tips for common issues with cloud-based applications

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +1200

Debugging in a cloud environment can be tricky, as it involves multiple layers of abstraction and virtualization. Unlike traditional on-premise environments, cloud environments are highly distributed and dynamic, making it challenging to identify and troubleshoot issues.

One of the biggest challenges with debugging cloud applications is the need for more visibility into the underlying infrastructure and the complexity of the application architecture. Fortunately, pinpointing and resolving the cause of the issue is much more manageable with server-side monitoring, detailed error reporting and cloud debugging solutions.

C# Debugging tools and techniques

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 10:45:44 +1300

Working in C#, as with any language, you’ll soon find that that you need to do some debugging. With C#, thankfully, due to a plethora of debugging tools and techniques, troubleshooting is usually straightforward.

Common debugging techniques

Debugging is highly context-sensitive, and the languages and tooling vary widely. In this post, I’ll be covering specific C# debugging tools and techniques in the next section. However, there are a few things you’ll need to know in any debugging situation.

Essential digital experience metrics for development teams

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +1200

For the team that’s down in the trenches untangling legacy code, writing unit tests, and just trying to come up with sensible variable names, it’s easy to lose sight of the other end of the process, where code meets customer. You test, you deploy, nothing breaks, and you move on. However, it’s just as important to keep an eye on code quality in production, and how it’s experienced.

Experience, though, is hard to quantify. What do you measure? How do you measure it? How do you improve it? And why do you care? We lay out answers in this post. Here are 5 of the best digital experience metrics to help developers understand their code quality from the customer’s perspective.

The 2023 guide to React debugging

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +1200

As React is the most popular JavaScript framework for creating component-based applications, you have access to a solid ecosystem of tools, resources, and best practices that can help with React debugging when something goes wrong.

To create a high-quality React application, you can’t skip over the debugging phase of your software development life cycle including everything from addressing error messages coming up in the development phase to monitoring live errors in production.

Microsoft Teams for Alerting has landed

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 20:20:57 +0000

Get crucial error and performance diagnostics sent directly to your chosen Microsoft Teams channel with Raygun Alerting.

C# Performance tips and tricks

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +1200

At Raygun, we’re a pretty polyglot group of developers. Various parts of our code base are written in different languages and frameworks — whatever is best for the job. That said, large parts of Raygun written with .NET, and we’re big .NET fans.

Given the prevalence of C# applications (C# has been in the top 5 on the TIOBE index for about 10 years!) and the massive scale of data Raygun deals with, we’re often called on to do C# optimization work. Most of our biggest performance gains come from really rethinking a problem and approaching it from a whole new angle.

9 popular JavaScript frameworks (and how to choose one for your project)

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 09:17:09 +1300

Choosing a JavaScript framework for a new project can be a daunting task. There’s always a new one getting hype from the community, while the established players still have a lot to offer.

So you need to do your homework and make sure the framework you choose is the right one for your specific requirements. Popularity alone is never the best indicator, but a review of the most widely-used options should help you decide which way to go.

Monitoring microservices: Everything you need to know

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 09:17:09 +1300

This article first appeared on [The New Stack](rel=canonical https://thenewstack.io/the-hows-whys-and-whats-of-monitoring-microservices/).

Monitoring remains a critical part of managing any IT system, while the challenges associated with monitoring microservices are especially unique. An example is how traditional monolithic systems, deployed as a single executable or library, have different points of failure and dependencies than those deployed with a microservices architecture.

Diagnose errors and performance problems right down to the line of code with Raygun.

[Learn more and try Raygun free for 14 days.](https://raygun.com/)

It’s important to understand monitoring in general and how it is different for microservices applications. Microservices-based applications have different, and more intensive, monitoring requirements. The business logic applied to a process, such as a loan application, for example, is distributed between many separate services. In this way, tracking an application through the process requires correlating data from all these different services.

Raygun API Beta is now open to everyone

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 20:20:57 +0000

We’re excited to announce the official Beta launch of the Raygun API, allowing you to extract, manipulate, and visualize insights from your account in innovative ways. This is included with all Raygun plans, and is now readily available to customers of all sizes.

Synthetic testing: A definition and how it compares to Real User Monitoring

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 01:52:01 +0000

Performance monitoring is critical for a healthy software application. No matter how much you test, when your code is in production, things will happen that you didn’t anticipate. If you don’t have synthetic testing or real user monitoring in place, opportunities for optimizations and fixes are slipping through the cracks.

The two main types of application monitoring are Real User Monitoring (RUM) and synthetic testing (or synthetic monitoring). It’s important to know the differences and to understand which will deliver the results you need.

Using OOP concepts to write high-performance Java code (2023)

Fri, 03 Feb 2023 09:17:09 +1300

Java is a class-based object-oriented programming (OOP) language built around the concept of objects. OOP concepts are intended to improve code readability and reusability by defining how to structure your Java program efficiently. There are seven core principles of object-oriented programming, as follows.

List of OOP concepts in Java:

Java comes with specific code structures for each OOP concept, such as the extends keyword for the inheritance principle or the getter and setter methods for the encapsulation principle.

40 most popular programming languages 2023: When and how to use them - Part 2

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 09:17:09 +1300

This is the second and final part in our exploration of the 40 most popular programming languages 2023: When and how to use them Find part one here to uncover the first top 20 on our list.

Welcome back to our exploration of the top 40 programming languages of 2023. In the first part, we delved into the leading 20 languages that are shaping the tech world this year. Today, we’ll continue our journey by examining the next 20 languages that are making significant strides. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting, these languages offer diverse opportunities and potential. Let’s dive in and discover what makes them noteworthy.

The 2023 guide to native app development

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 10:45:44 +1300

Native app development is the creation of software programs that run on specific devices and platforms. You can build native apps for desktops, smart TVs, and so on — but since the most popular target devices are smartphones, native app development is frequently used to mean mobile app development.

According to Statista’s latest data, Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS operating systems have squeezed every other mobile OS out of the market over the years, and in the fourth quarter of 2022, they made up 99.4 percent of the total mobile market. So we can safely say that going into 2023, mobile app development is still all about building native applications for the Android and iOS platforms.

11 of the most costly software errors in history

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 04:10:06 +0000

The mere mention of a serious software error can strike fear into the heart of any developer, project manager or tech leader.

The wrong error in the wrong system can be incredibly expensive and difficult to resolve, not to mention humiliatingly public. Catastrophic software errors are mercifully rare these days, but the potential for chaos, PR disasters and spiraling costs still remains.

Error monitoring solutions have become more and more of a necessity in recent years, but plenty of businesses still view monitoring as an optional extra, despite the fact that poor quality software continues to cost US organizations over $2 trillion annually.

40 most popular programming languages 2023: When and how to use them - Part 1

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 09:17:09 +1300

With the programming languages constantly evolving, it’s essential to keep track of which languages are leading the pack. In this 2-parter, we’ll dive into the top 40 programming languages of 2023 and analyze what makes them stand out. This is part one; stick around for part two at the end of this blog post.

There are many - maybe too many - programming languages to choose from. One of the most effective ways to assess their popularity is by the number of search queries for each language, across the web. The TIOBE Index is the definitive list of programming languages, ranked in order of search volume popularity as an indication of prominence and public interest. This article lists the top 40 languages on that list, with a brief overview and their pros, cons, and hiring prospects.

Raygun names Lana Vaughan as co-founder

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 11:59:09 +1300

Today I’m sharing the exciting news that we have named Lana Vaughan a co-founder of Raygun.

What does being a co-founder mean to me? I’ve always started with integrity. A co-founder needs to be somebody you can trust – really trust. When your back is to the wall, and everything feels like it’s not quite right, you need to know you can talk with your co-founder about it. This is a deep trust built over time, from shared challenges.

How Raygun’s security measures keep your customer’s data safe

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 23:57:24 +0000

At Raygun, we’re serious about protecting your privacy and safeguarding sensitive data. While our tools give you the unique ability to drill down into individual user sessions, we’re aware that you may not want sensitive customer information being collected by Raygun.

This article is a developer’s guide to using Raygun’s security measures: how to prevent collecting any user data through Raygun Crash Reporting and Real User Monitoring, and how to keep your own data secure.

Script error: What causes a Script error and how to solve them

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 05:33:35 +0000

“Script error” is one of the most cryptic error messages you may encounter. The main grievance is it provides no information about the actual cause of the problem. However, this secrecy is not a bug, but a feature that intends to protect your site from malicious attacks.

Please refer to the Raygun technical documentation regarding Script errors for quick fixes to the most common causes.

Surface script errors quickly

[Learn more and try Raygun Crash Reporting free for 14 days.](https://raygun.com/platform/crash-reporting)

What are Script errors?

Script errors occur when a client-side script that violates the same-origin policy of the user’s browser by making an invalid cross-origin HTTP request.

What are microservices? The pros, cons, and how they work

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 11:59:09 +1300

Microservices are a popular software design architecture that breaks apart monolithic systems. A microservice application is built as a collection of loosely coupled services. Each microservice is responsible for a single feature. They interact with each other via communication protocols such as HTTP.

Quicklinks

What are microservices

The microservice architecture is a software development methodology that helps with the design, development, and maintenance of large-scale applications.

Update: Expanding our new API functionality

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 20:20:57 +0000

Today we continue on our journey towards being API-first with two new updates – non-expiring tokens and regenerating API keys.

Java vs Python: Code examples and comparison

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 09:17:09 +1300

As two of the most popular and practical languages out there, should you choose Java or Python for your next project? Is one of these languages a clear-cut better option?

The answer is a long one. According to GitHub’s annual Octoverse report, Python has now climbed to the second most popular language in usage, pushing Java down to third place. Python also remains one of the top ten fastest-growing languages, but despite Python’s recent meteoric rise, it has actually been around longer than Java.

Announcement: Limited access to Raygun API

Sun, 20 Nov 2022 20:20:57 +0000

Today marks a new era for Raygun. With the closed launch of the Raygun API Beta, you’ll be able to use the powerful metrics surfaced in Raygun in exciting new ways. This is our first step towards being API first, so watch for future developments.

Crash Reporting & Real User Monitoring for React applications

Sun, 20 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog post, I’m going to talk about how to integrate Raygun4JS with React at a deeper level than what is provided out-of-the-box. None of these things are needed for Raygun4JS to do its primary job (reporting errors that happen on your website) but provide useful extra value for determining how your React application is performing and what is going wrong when an error occurs.

I will be covering the following topics:

Manage your Raygun quota effectively with these tips

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 08:45:27 +0000

If you have any concerns about going over your plan’s monthly event quota, this guide will help you implement strategies to manage your Raygun error quota effectively.

The key to staying within your quota is to keep the Raygun dashboard organized. This helps you save time too, as you’ll prevent non-critical errors staying active, ensuring you and your team are only alerted to the errors that matter.

We recommend implementing the following to manage your event quota effectively. Each takes just a few minutes:

17 Popular Java Frameworks for 2023: Pros, cons, and more

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 09:17:09 +1300

In 2023, Java is still the third most popular programming language in the world. It encompasses a vast ecosystem and more than 9 million Java developers worldwide. Java’s popularity comes down to a few key advantages; it’s a platform-independent language (write once, run anywhere) that follows the object-oriented programming paradigm and is straightforward to understand, write, and debug.

Thanks to the language’s maturity — the latest LTS (long-term support) release is Java 17 — and popularity, there are many ways to create Java applications. While you can always write Java code from scratch, there are also many excellent Java frameworks that allow you to efficiently build web and mobile applications, microservices, and REST APIs that run on the Java Virtual Machine.

12 top PHP frameworks for web developers to consider in 2023

Thu, 10 Nov 2022 08:00:00 +1300

PHP, or Hypertext Preprocessor (originally Personal Home Page), is an open-source server-side scripting language used for developing dynamic websites and web applications. It’s extremely popular, too — more than 75% of all websites were still using PHP as of October 2022, with no signs of slowing down any time soon. It’s free to download and use and powerful enough to run some of the biggest websites on the internet (WordPress, Facebook, and Wikipedia, just to name a few).

Increase customer retention & stop leaving money in the shopping cart

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 20:20:57 +0000

We all know the pain and frustration associated with broken software. It’s no secret that the internet is rife with broken links, slow pages, and broken shopping carts, often feeling like it’s being held together with glue and duct tape.

These issues aren’t just causing frustration for customers; it costs businesses millions. According to the Consortium for Information and Software Quality, poor software quality cost US companies $2.41 trillion in 2022. And with around 70% of online shoppers abandoning their carts before completing a purchase, every error in your checkout flow is directly leaving money on the table.

Java exceptions: Common terminology with examples

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 09:17:09 +1300

The Java programming language comes with advanced exception handling features that help programmers manage exceptional events. In Java, exceptions are either thrown by the compiler or occur during the execution of the program. Exceptions stop the normal flow of the program, so you need to handle them appropriately.

Be alerted to Java errors and crashes so you can diagnose faster

[Learn more and try Raygun Crash Reporting free for 14 days.](https://raygun.com/platform/crash-reporting)

In this article, we’ll have a look at all the terms and examples you need to understand Java exceptions.

Coming soon! Raygun Alerting’s Microsoft Teams integration

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 20:20:57 +0000

Microsoft Teams is a popular integration request for our Alerting feature, and the Raygun team is busy at work making this feature available to all our customers.

SOAP vs REST vs JSON - a 2023 comparison

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 20:20:57 +0000

SOAP vs REST vs JSON are comparisons that are frequently made in discussions about web services. While SOAP and REST are both leading approaches to transferring data over a network using API calls, JSON is a compact data format that RESTful web services can use.

Deciding whether you should create a SOAP vs REST API is an essential question if you are planning to provide a web service. Each architectural style has its own use cases, benefits, and limitations. In this article, we’ll look into both the SOAP protocol and the REST guidelines in detail and also see how JSON fits into the landscape.

Welcome to Raygun: A quick start guide for new and returning users

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 00:24:39 +0000

Welcome to Raygun. Whether you’re new to Raygun or have been a customer for a while, there’s always plenty to discover inside the Raygun app.

Raygun helps your development team discover and reproduce issues affecting end users with greater speed and accuracy. Less than 1% of users report a software error they encountered. Raygun helps you to discover these errors, look after your users and prevent future issues.

In this article, you’ll learn how to set up Raygun to be as effective as possible, and a few key features that we recommend.

Raygun Real User Monitoring and User Privacy

Thu, 08 Sep 2022 09:17:09 +1300

Those who have been paying close attention might have recently noticed small changes in sessions, browsers and platforms lists on Raygun.

Raygun is coming to London

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 09:17:09 +1300

After two years of being stranded at the bottom of the world, it’s time to dust off our passports and switch up our timezones. A small team from Raygun, including Co-Founder and CEO John-Daniel Trask, is hitting the UK at the end of this month to grab some quality time with London’s tech community and eCommerce leaders.

We’re escaping the dregs of the New Zealand winter to connect in person with our UK customers, partners, and supporters. We’ve got some big events locked in, but there’s still some space in the diary if you’re free.

Swift Package Manager for Raygun4Apple

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 09:17:09 +1300

Raygun4Apple can now be added to your project using the newer Swift Package Manager, instead of Cocoapods. Raygun4Apple provides Crash Reporting and Real User Monitoring for iOS, tvOS & macOS.

Core Web Vitals e-commerce analysis: part two

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 09:17:09 +1300

Get Alerted to mission-critical issues directly in Slack

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 09:17:09 +1300

You’ve spoken and we’ve listened and as a result, the highly anticipated Slack integration for Raygun Alerting is here! Once integrated with Slack, you’ll receive customized error, crash, and performance alert notifications directly to the channel of your choosing.

Search all apps - understand the impact of an error across your entire tech stack

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 09:17:09 +1300

One of the most requested features for Crash Reporting has been the ability to perform a search across all of your applications rather than by one application at a time (the default behavior). It’s not hard to see why it’s a popular feature request - rather than manually performing the same search across many applications, it would be super handy to perform one search and understand the impact of the search results across all of your applications immediately.

The top 12 APM tools for 2022

Thu, 04 Aug 2022 09:17:09 +1300

Application performance monitoring (APM) tools give you insight into the server-side performance of your website or application. From increased uptime and improved user experiences to reduced risks and decreased expenses, it provides an array of business benefits that help you move faster than competitors and deliver more value to users.

So it comes as no surprise that, according to analysis by Emergen Research, the global market for application performance monitoring (APM) tools is expected to reach $15B in 2028, an impressive uptick from 2020’s $6.54B.

Core Web Vitals e-commerce analysis

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 09:17:09 +1300

In 2021, Google introduced Core Web Vitals, three criteria to measure if a website is fast, stable, and responsive enough to give visitors a good digital experience. These factor into search ranking and have a powerful influence on customer behavior. But while Google has been urging the web performance community to get on board for more than two years, many are still falling short. We pulled data from the Chrome User Experience Report to conduct our own Core Web Vitals analysis, finding that even some of the largest e-commerce brands aren’t passing these thresholds.

Setting up applications in Raygun for optimal error monitoring

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 03:55:03 +0000

Error monitoring doesn’t have to be difficult, and setting up Raygun is super simple. All it takes is a few short lines of code added to your application and a few minutes of your time. However, once you’re reporting errors successfully, you might be wondering how best to set things up with all the other moving parts of your applications. (Or as a first-time user, you might just be trying to figure out exactly what an “application” refers to in Raygun).

The 7 CI/CD tools you need to know about

Mon, 11 Jul 2022 08:00:00 +1200

To maintain a high-velocity team and remain competitve, you need a solid CI/CD pipeline. Now, every team will have a unique set of objectives and requirements—which means that you’ll need a particular set of tools to help you accomplish your goals. This post will help identify some of the potential tools out there that can help you achieve your CI/CD ambitions, from the familiar Jenkins to security tools like Twistlock.

Core Web Vitals for Dev Leads

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 09:17:09 +1300

How can you quickly identify ways to improve user experience without breaking the bank or dropping your other projects? Well, according to Google, by focusing on Core Web Vitals. This is a tight but detailed 3-step guide to better UX using Core Web Vitals, for the busy technical lead or senior developer.

(This is Part 2 in a series — the first covered the big-picture view for execs, with Core Web Vitals’ impact on user retention and growth. For a deeper dive, grab our full guide to understanding, measuring and improving Core Web Vitals from a leadership perspective).

How to improve your Crash Free Users score in minutes

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 09:17:09 +1300

If you’re reading this blog, you likely already know the importance of quality software. But with the overwhelming number of metrics that can be monitored and improved, development teams are struggling with what metrics they should prioritize to have the most significant impact.

Coming soon! A sneak peek at Raygun Alerting’s Slack integration

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 09:17:09 +1300

The Slack integration is our #1 feature request for our Alerting feature, and the Raygun team has been busy at work making this feature available to all our customers. We expect this feature to be available around early - mid July 2022.

The SDLC: Popular models, benefits & best practices

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 09:17:09 +1300

The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) refers to the process we follow to deliver software to customers. It captures each step of creating software, from ideation to delivery, and eventually to maintenance.

In this post, we’ve broken down everything you need to understand the SDLC:

History of the SDLC

The field of software development as a profession has existed since the first computers and their operators, as far back as ENIAC and vacuum tubes. As the disclipine has matured, practices and methods for developing software have evolved.

New and improved Python error grouping

Tue, 17 May 2022 02:32:12 +0000

Raygun has a long history of continually improving the quality and capability of our Crash reporting grouping logic. Across thousands of customers, it’s essential to help teams quickly discern where to allocate their resources to fix bugs, resolve performance issues, and create better experiences for customers.

Today, we’re pleased to launch a new and improved grouping system for Python. Since our early days, Raygun has supported Python developers, with many Python-based systems reporting into Raygun on a daily basis.

How to implement a Blameless Postmortem (part two)

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 09:17:09 +1300

This is Part 2 of a two-part series on Blameless Postmortems. The previous article went into why blameless postmortems are so effective; this second part goes into detail on how to build your own postmortem process and kick it into overdrive. Read Part 1 here.

So you’ve read our first installment and recognized the value of the blameless postmortem for efficiency, culture, and output. Now you’re ready to get off the blame train and kickstart a blameless postmortem process of your own. Where to begin?

A guide to Apdex score: Calculations, improvements, and more

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 09:17:09 +1300

Apdex scores focus and align the varying perceptions of different teams. If you ask people in your organization to define what “performance” means for the application you’ve developed and deployed, you’re likely to get different answers. An SRE engineer might argue that a performant application has the highest possible uptime. A designer might say a critical dimension of performance is how easily users can get tasks done thanks to a carefully-crafted UI. Product or marketing folks might say the only performance that matters is an application that attracts users, retains them, and keeps MRR rising.

Show character with Blameless Postmortems (part one)

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 09:17:09 +1300

This is Part 1 of a two-part series on Blameless Postmortems. Today, we’ll discuss why blameless postmortems are so important and their implications for your team; the second part will go into detail on how to set them up as a process and make them successful.

Somebody wise may have once told you that how we handle adversity shows our character. Being able to acknowledge and admit mistakes is the first step towards learning — it’s a key part of success both in personal relationships and in large companies.

Webhooks for Raygun Alerting – Create custom third-party integrations

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 09:17:09 +1300

Since the introduction of Alerting to Raygun in late 2021, development teams have had more visibility into emerging issues than ever before. While the initial solution enabled you to get alert notifications by email, we knew that the next step was to give you more control over where you receive alerts.

When something breaks, you need to be notified natively in the tools you already know, use, and love. That’s why today we’re happy to announce webhooks support for Raygun Alerting. Now, you can create custom third-party integrations that connect Alerting seamlessly with Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, and many more tools in your technology stack. By using webhooks, you can build a faster issue resolution workflow – decreasing the time for you to see an alert and, in turn, reducing the time that issues are in your user’s hands.

Reports in Crash Reporting: A detailed view oF errors impacting your users

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 20:43:04 +0000

Raygun customers at the Team level can create a single custom reports to display their most vital data points. Business users can create up to five, and Enterprise customers have unlimited access.

Reports for Raygun Crash Reporting allows you to construct your own custom reports based on the data and criteria that you’d like to see and segment. For example, if you release a new version of your website and would like to see a detailed view of the errors affecting end users, Reports will allow you to get details quickly.

How to get the optimal image size for web

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 02:31:59 +0000

If you’ve ever started a project to improve the load times for your website, web app, or mobile app, your heart is in the right place — but your efforts might not be.

For many technology leaders, the first instinct is to blame code and infrastructure. They dive deep into optimizing front-end code, scale infrastructure resources, or migrate to a new type of database-as-a-service offering that promises to process requests a few milliseconds faster.

Raygun Alerting: Monitor your latest deployment

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 09:17:09 +1300

Modern development teams are shipping code faster than ever before. Having visibility into the issues that will inevitably get introduced into your software is crucial for the development process. Latest deployments for Raygun Alerting helps with just that. Now, you can tick the latest deployment checkbox on all Raygun alert types to only monitor your latest deployment and resolve issues before your customers ever even notice.

Raygun Alerts are useful for a number of reasons. Perhaps you’d like to know when a deployment introduces a new error group? Or maybe you’re a front-end developer who’d like to know if there is a significant spike in the load time of your website? What makes Alerting powerful is its versatility – there truly isn’t a right or wrong way to use it (although we do have some tips that you may find helpful).

Improving MTTR: Resolve incidents faster through better ops, alerts and docs

Wed, 19 Jan 2022 09:17:09 +1300

When downtime strikes any distributed software deployment or platform, it’s all hands on deck until the lights are green and service is restored. This process, from the recognition of a problem to a deployed solution, has most commonly been defined as MTTR — mean time to resolution.

In just the last few years, site reliability (SRE) and DevOps professionals have developed sophisticated new models for how they work and audit their successes. In 2022, MTTR is one of the most widely-used software performance success metrics. Most DevOps teams are asked to set quarterly or annual OKRs that require them to continuously improve their alerting workflows, resolution playbooks, process documentation, and internal communication to reduce MTTR.

Strategies and tips for better error grouping in Raygun

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 14:03:16 +1300

Raygun’s automatic error grouping helps you eliminate noise from repeated errors to keep your team focused. Error grouping is most powerful when it’s configured correctly, and most teams see significant reductions in error counts by making just a few changes. You may need to review your error grouping if there are many similar sounding error groups in your dashboard, for example, five error groups that all read “Script error.” In this article, I’ll go through four key strategies and tips to help you get the most from Raygun’s error grouping logic.

The Complete Guide to PHP Error Reporting

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 09:17:09 +1300

PHP isn’t the flashiest language, but has serious staying power, and it’s developed its own quirks and characteristics. It has also developed its own flavor of error reporting, which is fairly straightforward. In this post, we’ll show you how easy it is to add error monitoring for PHP.

No more searching through logs - diagnose and fix PHP errors faster with Raygun

[Learn more and try Raygun Crash Reporting free for 14 days.](https://raygun.com/platform/crash-reporting)

Defining PHP errors

A PHP error is a data structure that represents something that went wrong in your application. PHP has some specific ways you can invoke errors. One easy way to simulate an error is with the die() function:

A first look at Amazon CloudWatch Real User Monitoring

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 09:17:09 +1300

Real User Monitoring (RUM) has been providing valuable insights into real user experiences for many years. It’s not every day that we see a new player enter the market, but last week we did, and a very powerful player at that – Amazon. Real User Monitoring for Amazon CloudWatch was announced at AWS re:Invent 2021, adding to their existing suite of over 200 products and services. As you can imagine, our ears perked up at this announcement and we’re eager to take a look.

JavaScript security: Vulnerabilities and best practices

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 09:17:09 +1300

If you run an interactive website or application, JavaScript security is a top priority. There’s a huge array of things that can go wrong, from programmatic errors and insecure user inputs to malicious attacks.

While JavaScript error monitoring can help you catch many of these issues, understanding common JavaScript security risks and following best practices is just as important.

In this JavaScript security checklist, we’ll briefly look into the most frequent JavaScript exploits, then go through a couple of essential easy-to-implement JavaScript security best practices.

Build more resilient mobile apps with Flutter Crash Reporting

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 09:17:09 +1300

Powered by the Dart language, Flutter is one of the fastest-growing cross-platform programming frameworks in the world. Since its release in 2017 it has been empowering developers to build mobile apps that work seamlessly across iOS and Android with a single code-base. If you’re a Flutter developer, you’ll already know the importance of building better quality software, faster – after all, it was made for that very reason.

That’s why today, Raygun is proud to bring you Flutter support Crash Reporting. This highly requested release gives you complete visibility into the health of your Flutter applications, with rich diagnostics that take you to the root cause of errors and crashes.

Raygun's log4j vulnerability response

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 09:17:09 +1300

Over the weekend a high severity security vulnerability in the Java based log4j logging framework (CVE-2021-44228) was reported and is being actively exploited. This exploit is also known as “log4shell” and provides a vector for remote code execution.

Security is a top priority at Raygun so we have been actively reviewing our infrastructure to assess our exposure to this vulnerability and to ensure we continue to maintain a secure environment for your data.

The 9 best Real User Monitoring tools: A comparison report

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 09:17:09 +1300

What is Real User Monitoring?

Real User Monitoring (RUM) provides visibility into the performance experience of live users interacting with your web, mobile, or single-page apps.

RUM tools emerged to bridge the gap between application performance metrics and the impact on real people. These days, user experience is increasingly factored into the development process, but that still doesn’t stop slowdowns. JavaScript on the front-end can be unpredictable, and complex user environments can create all sorts of performance problems and significantly impact your bottom line. After all, poor software quality costs US businesses $2.08 trillion annually, and the stakes are only getting higher.

Announcing: Code-level insights with Azure Repos

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 09:17:09 +1300

How many times have you been aware of an error or performance issue, but lacked the ability to quickly uncover the root cause and determine why it happened in the first place? One of the most powerful ways to do this is by surfacing code-level insights right where you need them, alongside the context needed to take action. By using our latest integration with Azure Repos, you’ll be able to get to the ‘why’ of issues, faster – all directly within Raygun.

Four powerful Alerting workflows

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:09:00 +1200

Since its release last month, Alerting has quickly ingrained itself into the incident response workflow at some of the most technically advanced companies in the world. We’re here to empower your team to do the same. In this blog, we’ll run through four common alerts that you can implement today to ensure you’re maximizing the full potential of Alerting.

If this is the first you’re hearing of Raygun Alerting and would like to learn more about what it is and how it works, I recommend reading the launch blog before revisiting this workflow guide.

An overview of key .NET 6 features

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 00:09:00 +1200

.NET 6 is finally here, giving us a new long term stable version of .NET Core. .NET 6 succeeds .NET 5, which was generally seen as a “skip version” by most of us, getting limited use compared to .NET Core 3.1. With this release, we get updates to both the runtime and the C# language. In this post, we’re taking a closer look at what we see as three of the most useful .NET 6 features.

Alerting has landed: Never miss another mission-critical issue again

Tue, 26 Oct 2021 00:09:00 +1200

Time is of the essence when identifying and resolving issues in your software. The longer it takes for a fix to be deployed, the greater the consequences for your customers. Visibility and speed are core to what makes Raygun powerful and is why today we’re excited to continue this journey with our latest feature – Alerting.

Celebrating vaccinated teams with 1M free events

Tue, 19 Oct 2021 09:17:09 +1300

We’re proud to say that Raygun is well on the way to being 100% vaxxed, with every member of our team choosing to get immunized against Covid-19. So we’re celebrating by giving away one million events to vaccinated teams for a bug-free 2021. Any new customers who show us that they’re fully vaccinated qualify for 1M free events in 2021.

Battling bugs 💪

Team Raygun has always been passionate about blasting bugs, and Covid-19 is no exception. We invited staff to share their vaccination status for our Health and Safety register, and when we realised that we’d all said yes to the vaxx, we decided to do something to mark this awesome milestone. This offer is to show our commitment to keeping our community safe and our appreciation to software teams who share that commitment. It’s a way to extend our collective contribution just a bit further, and say “Hey, thanks!” from our people to yours.

A look at the upcoming improvements to LINQ in .NET 6

Tue, 21 Sep 2021 00:09:00 +1200

This article is an expanded exploration of several items mentioned by Richard Lander in Microsoft’s May 2020 announcement of .NET 6 Preview 4. I would be remiss if I didn’t give credit where credit was due.

Announcing: Bitbucket for APM

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 00:09:00 +1200

Raygun’s latest integration with Bitbucket gives you code-level insights into your traces, directly in APM.

Announcing: Greater visibility into Core Web Vitals

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 00:09:00 +1200

Raygun now gives you unrivaled control, granularity, and insights into Core Web Vitals and your real users’ experience.

The complete guide to debugging JavaScript in major browsers

Sun, 09 May 2021 10:30:09 +1300

There are a few things in the development world that can make a huge difference to the quality of your JavaScript code. Effective JavaScript debugging is one of them.

Every major browser, from Google Chrome to Firefox, comes with a built-in debugging tool which surfaces any issues quickly. With better use of browser-based debugging tools, you can diagnose and debug JavaScript issues much faster so you can create better quality code, faster.

Launch Notes: Native Core Web Vitals, versionised deployment tracking, updated APM

Wed, 05 May 2021 00:09:00 +1200

Raygun’s Launch Notes are your regular round-up of all the improvements we made to Raygun last month — from significant features to performance updates.

Introducing native support for Core Web Vitals

Mon, 03 May 2021 00:09:00 +1200

In December last year, we released tracking for Core Web Vitals using custom tagging so that you can have consolidated performance metrics that accurately reflect your customer’s digital experience.

Today, we are excited to continue this journey and announce our native first-class support for Core Web Vitals (CWV) tracking within Real User Monitoring. Now, you can see a detailed overview of how your website performs against Google’s modern user-centric metrics, alongside all the diagnostics you need to take action.

Debug JavaScript in Safari in 7 easy steps [2019]

Thu, 29 Apr 2021 10:00:09 +1300

This article will focus on debugging JavaScript code within Safari Web Inspector. Safari Web Inspector is a powerful tool built into Safari on OSX that makes finding and fixing bugs a lot faster!

Raygun lets you detect and diagnose errors and performance issues in your codebase with ease

It takes minutes to add Raygun into your software. Be alerted to issues affecting end users and replicate problems 1,000x faster than using logs and incomplete information from users. Learn more and try Raygun free for 14 days.

The steps we are going to follow are:

Debug JavaScript in Opera in 7 easy steps

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 10:00:09 +1300

This article will focus on debugging JavaScript code within Opera’s Developer Tools. It’s important to note that since Opera switched to the Blink rendering engine (a fork of WebKit) in 2013 the debugging tools and process is identical to Chrome. This is great news as there are huge amount of resources published about Chrome’s Dev Tools which are 100% applicable to debugging in Opera.

Opera’s use of Blink means they share extremely powerful tools which will speed up your bug finding and fixing process!

Raygun’s Dashboards: Spot performance problems and get data quickly

Sat, 24 Apr 2021 01:59:49 +0000

Raygun crash, error and performance monitoring brings you a new way to view and sort your data with Custom Dashboards.

The dashboard feature, which you will find inside your Raygun account – is designed to give you a better understanding of your overall software health, from errors and crashes to performance problems affecting your end users. To do this, Raygun gathers a vast amount of data about how users are interacting with your application and whether it’s performing optimally. We then present that data in an easy-to-use and intuitive UI: dashboards.

5 Git workflow best practices you've got to use [2021]

Mon, 05 Apr 2021 20:25:05 +0000

Have you been using the same Git commands for years, without a second thought on how your Git workflow can be improved?

Or are you a new developer who could use some handy Git tips and tricks?

This week, we’ll take a look at five Git tips you can seamlessly incorporate into your workflow to make it easier to get your code into prod.

Raygun lets you detect and diagnose errors and performance issues in your codebase with ease

1. Rebase Git workflow

When you’ve finished a feature on a local branch and it’s time to commit your changes to the master branch, you might prefer merging over rebasing.

How healthy are your applications? Find out quickly with customizable Dashboard tiles

Tue, 23 Mar 2021 21:18:07 +0000

Editable dashboard tiles are a key Raygun feature for tracking progress and to share and prove the value of development work.

If you haven’t already used Raygun’s Dashboards, you can read about them here.

Dashboards give you and your team a high-level overview of the health of your application. This is achieved with customizable dashboard tiles that you can drag, drop and edit however you want!

The data to display is entirely up to you. Whether you want to understand the locations of your end users or how many are experiencing crashes in real time, Raygun will present the data you’re after on a user-friendly dash that looks pretty dang good (if we do say so ourselves). Use the TV mode to display this information company-wide.

Launch Notes: Announcing Node.js for APM, all-new Customers, provider updates, and more

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 00:09:00 +1200

Raygun’s Launch Notes are your regular round-up of all the improvements we made to Raygun last month — from significant features to performance updates.

Gain more visibility into code performance with Raygun APM for Node.js

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +1200

Raygun has been busy building our best-in-class APM so you can provide flawless digital customer experiences. By adding Raygun Application Performance Monitoring to your monitoring suite, your team will gain more visibility on code and server performance, achieve a faster time to resolution with finer granularity, and reduce infrastructure costs by optimizing existing services.

Build successful React Native apps with Raygun

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +1200

React Native has come a long way since an internal prototype at Facebook to where it is now. The cross-platform framework is now a go-to tool for businesses to develop natively rendered mobile apps for iOS and Android.

Solve issues faster with customer experience monitoring

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +1200

Thousands of developers rely on Raygun to help them deliver great customer experiences every day. Software teams can spend 75% of their time debugging errors and performance problems — mostly in the manual process of finding and diagnosing them.

Link back to source from GitHub, Bitbucket and GitLab

Tue, 26 Jan 2021 23:02:29 +0000

Raygun Crash Reporting gives you the deep diagnostic details you need to fix an error quickly and efficiently. When an error is thrown by your application, the error details appear in your dashboard under the ‘Summary’ tab where you can find the stacktrace details.

Having this information available is really important for efficient error management. However, some of our customers need better access to the stacktrace information for an even faster fix. For example, you may find moving between your repo and your stacktrace data tedious and messy, especially when dealing with lots of files and having to copy and paste the path.

Better customer experiences with Raygun and Heroku

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +1200

Exciting news for our Heroku community — Raygun Real User Monitoring (RUM) is now available on the Heroku Marketplace.

What is site reliability engineering (SRE) and how is it different from DevOps?

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 09:17:09 +1300

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is Google’s method of service management where software engineers run production systems using a software engineering approach. It’s clear that Google is unique, and they usually need to tackle software bugs and errors in different and non-conventional ways. But having software engineers doing a job that is traditionally done by professionals with a systems administration background sounds impractical. Well, it was good enough to succeed, so Google decided to share their wisdom in a book format a few years ago.

Raygun’s favorite features of 2020: APM and more

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +1200

Raygun is proud to deliver tools that help software teams build software that is reliable, error-free, and fast.

Last year was no exception. From more language support to better performance, we released a host of new features designed to help you provide better digital customer experiences.

Here, we’ll highlight the cream of the crop — our most significant features released in 2020. We cover our full product suite, plus there’s a hint on what’s to come in 2021.

December Launch Notes: Track Core Web Vitals, .NET 5 and Blazor support, and more

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 00:09:00 +1200

Raygun’s Launch Notes are your regular round-up of all the improvements we made to Raygun last month — from significant features to performance updates.

How to debug Android Chrome from Windows, Linux, or Mac

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 09:13:09 +1300

Testing and debugging websites and web apps on mobile devices can be challenging. Browsers on phones and tablets often don’t have built-in debuggers, and emulating mobile devices is never as accurate as you’d like. To debug mobile websites on Android, the desktop version of Chrome provides a solution with remote debugging.

This article will show you how to use remote debugging with Chrome from your computer. You can use one of the common desktop operating systems like Windows, macOS, or Linux.

Debug JavaScript in Internet Explorer 11 in 7 easy steps

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 10:00:09 +1300

This article will focus on debugging JavaScript code within Internet Explorer 11’s Developer Tools.

The developer tools built into IE11 make developing and debugging code in the browser relatively straightforward. The browser’s tools boast many of the features of the other more developer-focused browsers such as Chrome and Firefox.

While Microsoft declared the end of support for IE11 by Aug 17th, 2021, with many people still using the browser, it is useful to have some debugging skills to hand.

November Launch Notes: Work at Raygun, a new Raygun agent, and more

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 00:09:00 +1200

Raygun’s Launch Notes are your regular round-up of all the improvements we made to Raygun last month — from significant features to performance updates.

Tracking Core Web Vitals with Raygun

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 00:09:00 +1200

Important update: You can now track Core Web Vitals natively in Raygun Real User Monitoring. Visit our announcement blog to see how you can start monitoring and improving your Core Web Vitals.

Improving front-end performance for a website is known to increase the likelihood that users will engage, enjoy, and continue to use a website. This leads to better business outcomes by improving customers’ digital experiences — no-one likes waiting for a slow page to respond.

Welcome to Raygun APM: A quick-start guide for new and returning customers

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 09:17:09 +1300

Welcome to Raygun APM.

Raygun’s modern Application Performance Monitoring (APM) beats traditional solutions by providing actionable, developer-level insights into server-side performance issues.

In this article, you’ll learn how to set up Raygun APM to be the most effective, plus a few key features that we recommend.

The essential setup section of this guide will help you navigate through creating the foundation of your Raygun APM setup. Once you have the basic steps completed, we recommend you follow the advanced guide to start receiving and displaying data that suits your preferences and developer workflow.

How tech leaders are prioritizing customer experience

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 08:00:00 +1300

The Tech Leaders’ Tour is a series of events bringing tech leaders together to learn from each other about improving software quality and customer experience.

This one was special because we are able to hold it in-person, in one of our favorite cities — Auckland, NZ, where there are no social distancing rules at the time of writing.

In today’s climate, technology companies are faced with many challenges. But one thing should remain the same — the focus on delivering value to the customer.

How to build 3 powerful APM workflows with Raygun

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 09:10:09 +1300

From investigating slow performance to digging into inefficient API calls, there are many ways we can approach improving application performance on any given day. Raygun gives developers actionable metrics on performance bottlenecks so you can prioritize your day to day workflow around creating better customer experiences.

While there are many ways to use application performance monitoring, if you’re just starting, we’ve created this guide to help you, as a developer, to implement and roll out APM.

October Launch Notes: Tech Leaders’ Panel, spike protection, and more

Tue, 10 Nov 2020 00:09:00 +1200

Raygun’s Launch Notes are your regular round-up of all the improvements we made to Raygun last month — from significant features to performance updates.

Announcing flexible, scalable pricing for modern tech teams

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 00:09:00 +1200

We’re on a mission to give you more control, with fewer restrictions. The new usage-based plans from Raygun give your team more flexibility than ever, with pricing that only charges you for what you use.

APM and Real User Monitoring now start from just $8 USD per month per 10K traces/sessions, and $4 USD per month per 10K error events for Crash Reporting.

It’s never been easier to get actionable, real-time insights into the quality and performance of your web and mobile apps. If you’re an existing customer on a legacy plan, ask one of our friendly support staff, and we’ll discuss options for converting your existing plan to usage-based billing.

Debug JavaScript in Firefox in 7 easy steps

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 09:10:09 +1300

This article will focus on debugging JavaScript code within Firefox’s Developer Tools. The Dev Tools within Firefox are extremely powerful which will speed up finding and fixing bugs.

We’ll be using Raygun Crash Reporting to find the stack trace and the line of code the error occurred on. You can sign up for a free 14-day trial here.

The steps we are going to follow are:

So, let’s dive in!

September Launch Notes: RUM on Heroku, APM for Ruby, and more

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 00:09:00 +1200

Raygun’s Launch Notes are your regular round-up of all the improvements we made to Raygun last month — from significant features to performance updates.

Announcing Ruby support for Raygun APM

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +1200

We’ve built Raygun APM to be the best solution on the market today, with more code-level detail, better visualization, and powerful infrastructure that helps developers discover and diagnose performance bottlenecks in a fraction of the time — and for a fraction of the cost.

Gain actionable insights with XHR-level detail for response codes

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +1200

A broken or poor performing XHR can significantly impact a user’s experience with a page by slowing down the load time or causing it to break entirely. Many of our customers monitoring web applications agree that monitoring and optimizing XHR calls is the biggest lever they have to improve application performance.

In April of this year, we announced that Raygun Real User Monitoring can now surface analytics into the response codes from XHR calls. In this latest release, we’ve added XHR level detail to the response codes tab in RUM. Now, you can see the XHRs causing a particular response code.

August Launch Notes: Visualize performance trends over time, a new Raygun Agent version, and more

Mon, 07 Sep 2020 00:09:00 +1200

Raygun’s Launch Notes are your regular round-up of all the improvements we made to Raygun last month — from significant features to performance updates.

Celebrating issue 50 of Performance Matters

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 09:17:09 +1300

When we first launched Performance Matters a year ago, we didn’t just want to surface the performance stories of the big tech companies; our goal was to share and highlight the hard work of thousands of people making software faster.

Since then, we’ve delivered over 550 articles, community ideas, tweets, videos, and the occasional comic strip from every corner of the web to your inbox.

Here are the 10 most popular articles from all 50 issues of our weekly performance newsletter.

How we scale Raygun's architecture to handle more data

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 09:17:09 +1300

Due to the huge importance of sourcemaps in the workflow of our customers, sourcemaps are a crucial part of our Crash Reporting offering.

We constantly strive to stay ahead of our customer demands as the amount of data we process continues to grow. We identified the sourcemapping process as an area ripe for performance improvement, so we took it apart and looked at exciting ways to build it from the ground-up using cutting-edge tech. Our key objectives were: horizontal scalability, blazingly fast processing rates and easy monitorability.

Debug JavaScript in Google Chrome’s Dev Tools in 7 easy steps

Fri, 21 Aug 2020 09:10:00 +1300

This article will focus on debugging JavaScript code within Google Chrome’s Developer Tools. Chrome’s Developer Tools are extremely powerful and will almost certainly speed up your troubleshooting process.

We’ll be using Raygun Crash Reporting to find the stack trace and the line of code the error occurred on. You can sign up for a free 14-day trial here.

The steps we are going to follow are:

So, let’s dive in!

How we made an 83% performance improvement using Real User Monitoring

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 09:17:09 +1300

As applications evolve, we may start to lose visibility into why things are slow.

Web apps often suffer in silence as customers are more likely to leave when they’re unsatisfied rather than reach out. Complex user flows, resource-intensive API calls, and an ever-growing codebase can all contribute to poor performance.

This is why we don’t have scheduled performance days. At Raygun, the engineers are empowered to investigate improving the performance of our product, using our own tools to support us.

Visualize performance trends over time with the latest graph for RUM

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +1200

Monitoring trends in application performance helps you identify poor performance and visualize the impact of performance optimizations you’ve made.

July Launch Notes: Custom timings for RUM, Code filtering and more

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 00:09:00 +1200

Raygun’s Launch Notes are your regular round-up of all the improvements we made to Raygun last month — from significant features to performance updates.

How Raygun increased transactions per second by 44% by removing Nginx

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 09:17:09 +1300

Here at Raygun, improving performance is baked into our culture. In a previous blog post, we showed how we achieved a 12% performance lift by migrating Raygun’s API to .NET Core 3.1.

In publishing this, a question was asked on Twitter as to why we still use Nginx as a proxy to the Raygun API application. Our response was that we thought this was the recommended approach from Microsoft. It turns out this has not been the case since the release of .NET Core 2.1. Kestrel has matured a lot since the .NET Core 1.0 days when we first started using it and the security experts at Microsoft are comfortable with Kestrel being used on the front line since the release of .NET Core 2.1.

Debug JavaScript in Microsoft Edge in 7 steps

Wed, 29 Jul 2020 10:00:09 +1300

This article will focus on debugging JavaScript code within Microsoft Edge Developer Tools. The Edge DevTools are a powerful toolset built into the Edge browser on Microsoft Windows 10. The DevTools are also available as a standalone app to download from the Microsoft Store, if one prefers to run them separately from Edge itself.

We’ll be using Raygun Crash Reporting to find the stack trace and the line of code the error occurred on. You can sign up for a free 14-day trial here.

Detect Content Security Policy (CSP) violations with Raygun

Mon, 20 Jul 2020 10:45:44 +1300

A Content Security Policy (CSP) is an added layer of security that helps to detect and mitigate certain types of attacks, including Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and data injection attacks. These attacks are used for everything from data theft to site defacement to the distribution of malware.

APM isn’t just for Ops: Shifting Left and supercharging your developers

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 10:45:44 +1300

When we were rethinking what an Application Performance Monitoring product could be, we did what we always did. We thought of developers, and the ultimate users that they serve.

It’s no surprise then that two years back, we built an all-new take on APM from scratch. One that armed developers with the level of insights that they need to deliver great software.

Fortunately, we seemed to be onto something here. The relics of the past are now starting to talk about “shifting left,” meaning “moving to the left on the SDLC,” meaning “empower the developers to get in earlier in the delivery to ensure a great outcome.”

RUM and APM: Your solution for building better user experiences

Tue, 07 Jul 2020 10:45:44 +1300

As modern development practices evolve at rapid rates we must stay focused on what makes for a great experience; fast, flawless software.

In the pursuit of building fast, performant software, you’ve likely come across performance monitoring products like Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Application Performance Monitoring (APM). In this article, we go deeper into how using RUM and APM can help you and your team build better software experiences.

Real User Monitoring (RUM) surfaces meaningful diagnostic information on front-end performance so you can ship fast, performant front-end code, and deliver the best possible user experience.

Why Real User Monitoring Matters

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 04:35:26 +0000

Raise your hand if any of the following scenarios have ever happened to you:

You’ve worked somewhere close to ten sprints on an apparently much-needed feature, resulting in only two customers ever using it.
You’ve spent hours on a production bug for an old browser (on its last throes of provider updates) that only a fraction of your customers use.
You’ve worked hard on a site or mobile application, but have absolutely no idea who’s using it or if any of the features you’ve created for it are being used.

If you’ve found yourself experiencing any of the above scenarios, I’m sure you thought “there must be a better way!”

Track any web performance metric with improved custom timings for Real User Monitoring

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +1200

Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed a couple of key trends in the performance monitoring space.

Achieving a 12% performance lift migrating Raygun's API to .NET Core 3.1

Thu, 04 Jun 2020 09:17:09 +1300

Here at Raygun, improving performance is baked into our culture. We don’t just think about our application performance, but more broadly, we look at our own infrastructure and ask if there’s anything we can do to make it more performant for our business and for our customers.

Two years ago, we switched our API from Node.js to .NET Core and achieved a 2000% increase in throughput. To continue that story, we recently upgraded .NET Core 2.1 to 3.1 and saw a 12% increase in performance.

Diagnose slow page requests with the latest addition to RUM

Wed, 03 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +1200

Earlier in the year, we launched the request details page in Raygun Real User Monitoring. This update brought the instance-level insights into page performance to help you understand exactly what caused poor performance and how to improve it.

Why high-performing teams consolidate monitoring tools with Raygun APM

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 09:17:09 +1300

Raygun helps thousands of software teams diagnose and resolve performance problems faster and more efficiently. We understand that in today’s current climate, there is even more pressure on teams to ensure software quality across the whole stack, all while being cost-effective.

It’s no easy task! But we know that consolidating tools can help. Resolving performance problems becomes faster and more cost effective when your whole team has access to performance data without needing to correlate between disparate tools.

Control the chaos - The importance of monitoring traffic spikes

Thu, 07 May 2020 09:17:09 +1300

You’ve spent years scaling your infrastructure alongside your business growth, and day-to-day, your application performance is thriving. But what happens when your traffic spikes out of your predicted “normal” range, heading into unchartered territory? Are you prepared to support this new influx of customers? Or will you crumble under the pressure of it all - leaving customers dissatisfied at the poor user experience?

It doesn’t have to be this way. You need visibility into your software performance through the use of a Real User Monitoring tool in order to monitor traffic spikes effectively. Let’s dig into not only how we can manage the risks associated with traffic spikes, but also why we should care about the implications in the first place.

How to identify and resolve front-end performance bottlenecks

Thu, 07 May 2020 08:00:00 +1200

We all want lightning-fast websites and applications, but how do we prioritize our efforts in order to have the biggest impact on performance?

We interviewed our own front-end team so we could share some best practices we use every day to improve and maintain the performance of Raygun. Sumitra, Ben, and Nicholas take a deep-dive into identifying performance problems using Real User Monitoring, what to prioritize when looking for trends in performance, and how to communicate the impact of their work to the wider team.

Monitor application health with the new response codes tab in RUM

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +1200

In this release, we’re bringing an all-new section to Real User Monitoring to provide another way for you to monitor application health; the Response Codes tab.

Remote pair programming: Tips, tools, and how to measure

Thu, 09 Apr 2020 09:17:09 +1300

Remote pair programming is an Extreme Programming (XP) methodology which is a part of the Agile software development model. It takes the principle of pair programming to the remote workplace. Pair programming leads to higher quality code and fewer bugs by making continuous code reviews and synchronous collaboration possible.

In traditional pair programming, two programmers sit side by side in front of the same computer. Remote pair programmers share the same workspace remotely by using real-time collaboration tools.

Unlock next-level detail in Real User Monitoring with these latest improvements

Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +1200

In our latest release, we’re rolling out a whole series of improvements to Raygun Real User Monitoring that gives you the instance-level data you need to understand exactly how your application is performing in every single user session.

The art of shipping and monitoring software with speed and confidence

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +1200

Software teams are under increasing pressure to ship code faster than ever before, but without the right workflow and tools in place, this can introduce unnecessary risk and headache. We wanted to share how to configure deployments, identify issues, and track performance gains using tools and process to get the best results and enable you to ship software with speed and confidence.

The tools we will be using in today’s example include Jenkins, Octopus, and Raygun. These are all available on a free trial so you can follow along.

March Launch Notes: First paint metrics, Ruby APM release, and more

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +1200

Raygun’s Launch Notes are your regular round-up of all the improvements we made to Raygun last month — from significant features to performance updates.

Announcing new-look notifications for Slack

Wed, 11 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +1200

We’ve had a lot of great feedback about our integration with Slack. Customers find it invaluable to have all the information about an error or issue delivered to a channel of their choice.

Top tips to improve JavaScript performance for faster websites

Wed, 26 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +1200

Performance is one of the most important concerns when developing an application. All software developers should monitor and improve performance in every layer of the application. From the database to the server-side language, there are plenty of opportunities for performance issues to arise, and the front end is certainly no exception.

So that’s why today we’re talking about JavaScript performance and how to improve it. We’ll start by explaining why JavaScript performance, in particular, is so important, and then proceed to show you some tips you can use to improve your JavaScript code. Let’s go.

Benchmarking web performance: An actionable guide using Real User Monitoring

Thu, 20 Feb 2020 09:17:09 +1300

Customer experience is becoming a key differentiator between competitors. Actually, it already is! If your website is performing poorly, it’s hurting your business. The first step towards improving this performance is using a real user monitoring tool to identify problems and monitor your progress towards improvement.

If you’re new to RUM, this article will offer some real user monitoring best practices on how to benchmark, measure, and improve your web and mobile performance no matter what your goals are.

Announcing: First Paint Metrics and Advanced Visualizations

Mon, 17 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +1200

Since Real User Monitoring (RUM) first launched in 2015, Raygun has helped thousands of teams identify and resolve front-end performance bottlenecks impacting their customers.

Today, we’re excited to announce support for first paint and first contentful paint, along with rich new visualizations designed to help you better identify and diagnose performance problems in your software.

6 tips for preventing performance headaches in retail apps

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 19:51:36 +0000

Are you still thinking about last year’s software performance headaches?

You aren’t alone. Even large-scale retail apps experience preventable problems like broken payment buttons, and every year we hear of another retail giant that is unable to cope with traffic spikes on Black Friday – a $3 billion e-commerce day.

Luckily, many of these software problems can be prevented. We’ve put together a few tips for maintaining performant retail apps so you can be ready for anything.

January Launch Notes: First paint preview, provider updates, and more

Fri, 07 Feb 2020 09:17:09 +1300

Raygun’s Launch Notes are your regular round-up of all the improvements we made to Raygun last month — from major features to performance updates.

Real User Monitoring

Preview: First paint and first contentful paint metrics

With the release of our new first paint and first contentful paint metrics for RUM, you’ll be able to get a more granular understanding of how users experience your application. This exciting new update will include:

Database performance improvement - How-to in 4 easy steps

Thu, 16 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +1200

During development, it’s important to think about how your application will work with your databases. You can run into performance issues all the way through the stack, so you’ll want to be mindful of how the data is being accessed. From the client to the database, there are layers where trouble may creep in.

Here are database performance issues you might encounter:

Object relational mapping frameworks (ORMs)
SQL code
Database design
Indexes
Database maintenance
Middle-tier/front-end code (posing as a database performance issue)

In this post, we’ll go through the steps to resolving database performance issues. Basically, the steps are identify, proactively respond, measure, and resolve. But as you’ll see, you can be smarter and more efficient by measuring first.

Memory leak detection - How to find, eliminate, and avoid

Thu, 09 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +1200

As a software developer, you might not be used to thinking about the memory usage of your applications. In today’s development world, memory is plentiful and usually quite fast. Odds are, the programming language you use doesn’t require you to allocate your own memory, or free it when you’re done. That doesn’t mean that you’re in the clear when it comes to memory leaks though.

The reality is that memory leaks can strike any application in any language. They’re more common in older or “closer to the metal” languages like C or C++, sure. But all it takes is a visit to one poorly-optimized web page to discover that even a language like JavaScript can have problems with memory leaks.

Measuring the unmeasurable - How AWS, Alexa, Tableau Software and Raygun monitor what matters

Thu, 19 Dec 2019 08:00:00 +1300

The Tech Leaders’ Tour is a series of events bringing tech leaders together to learn from each other about improving software quality and customer experience.

“3.7%. That’s how penetrated the cloud market is today. We’re talking a trillion-dollar market only penetrated by 3.7%. The world is up for grabs.”

Kicking off the Tech Leaders’ Tour in Seattle, Peter from AWS introduces our central theme direct from the Oscar Building at Amazon HQ.

Why actionable data is worth its weight in gold and more from our Tech Leaders' Tour

Thu, 19 Dec 2019 08:00:00 +1300

The Tech Leaders’ Tour is a series of events bringing tech leaders together to learn from each other about improving software quality and customer experience.

Monitoring today is more complex and nebulous than ever before. Teams have to deal with barriers like tooling, data overwhelm, and process problems making it difficult to get a clear line of communication from code to customer.

Raygun APM: Our commitment to performance

Wed, 18 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +1200

Ever since the public release of Raygun APM for .NET, we’ve been busy at work to make this the best APM product on the market that provides meaningful data to developers, making debugging and troubleshooting much easier.

A complete guide to getting started with the Node debugger

Tue, 03 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +1200

Diagnosing and finding the root cause of issues is a crucial skill in software development. Software engineers spend the majority of their time reading and understanding existing code. Because of this, knowing how to debug your applications with proficiency will save you time and make you more effective.

In this article, we’ll be looking at the Node.js debugger and some helpful ways you can improve how you debug your own applications. We’ll take a small, straightforward example and demonstrate ways one can easily find issues in code. By the end, you’ll be equipped with enough knowledge to debug your own Node.js applications, as well as possess new techniques you can apply to your particular situation.

Build faster, error-free Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps with Raygun

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +1200

With 900 million devices running on Windows 10, the future is bright for the Universal Windows Platform (UWP).

Monitoring .NET Core - Raygun’s multithreaded trace capability explained

Fri, 25 Oct 2019 08:00:00 +1200

Raygun’s CTO Jeremy Norman chats with Alex Williams of The New Stack to give a technical demo of the multithreaded trace feature in Raygun APM. Jeremy offers practical examples of how traces work, how you can monitor microservices more accurately, and why Raygun is different from other APM tools.

Here are the highlights - plus watch the full demo below.

Originally published on The New Stack.

Speed AND Reliability: How to move fast and fix things [Webinar]

Tue, 22 Oct 2019 08:00:00 +1200

“Working closely with business and developer to find the happy ground is what you have to do, otherwise you’re going to continue to find problems. But try and map it back to your product success, and outcomes, and appetite in the market.” - Sam Hunt, VP APAC at GitHub.

What to expect in this webinar

In this Raygun webinar, our host Andre and guest host Eliza get curious about what it takes for teams to ship things faster, but still keep the focus on the end user.

How our tiger team reduced SQL query latency by 300% using automation

Thu, 10 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +1200

This is a guest post from Matt Fleming from Code Blueprint. Matt is a Senior Performance Engineer at SUSE.

Some development problems are too complex, some timelines too tight, and some projects too greenfield for established teams to tackle. When you need to create a new team of developers for an ambitious project, the venerable cross-functional or tiger team provides the perfect model for bringing a ragtag crew together to achieve a shared goal.

Introducing unlimited dashboards - Now available on all plans

Thu, 10 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +1200

Raygun gathers a great deal of data about how users are interacting with your applications - from errors and crashes to users affected by performance problems. We help thousands of teams gain visibility into the health of their apps - and one of the best ways developers do that is with Raygun’s dashboards.

The first rule about technical debt - never talk about technical debt

Wed, 02 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +1200

Have you ever been frustrated that your warnings and opinions on technical debt are going unheard? Or you’ve felt pushed to deploy code and software updates that are either not ready, or will cause your team more headaches than other stakeholders appreciate?

You’re not alone.

Whether you are building an early-stage startup or working at a vast 20-year-old monolith, technical debt mounts as you make changes and deploy new functionality. All while the product managers, product owners, and senior leadership team push you to do more, faster, and with higher quality.

Software team KPIs for competitor beating software

Fri, 27 Sep 2019 08:00:00 +1200

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in 2017. We’ve updated it to be more relevant.

Back in the bad old days of battleship grey UIs, rounded corners made up with GIF files and “Best Viewed With Netscape Navigator 3.0” badges, businesses just wanted their software teams to ship – quality be damned!

In today’s modern software world, things are much different. Technology leaders are expected to deliver on time.

Make fewer HTTP requests: What this means and how to do it

Wed, 18 Sep 2019 08:00:00 +1200

Thanks to advancements in JavaScript engines, the performance of websites has considerably improved in recent years. However, there are aspects of websites that are out of the control of engines and yet to be adequately optimized by browsers. One of these aspects is the number of HTTP requests that your webpage makes.

A simple way to decrease the number of HTTP requests in your page is to simplify its design. But that’s not always a practical approach. In this post, we’ll look at techniques you can employ to improve the performance of your website while still having a stylish page design.

Stop using NPS to measure software quality

Mon, 16 Sep 2019 08:00:00 +1200

Using NPS as an engineering metric gets product owners into hot water.

Before we dive into why, let’s first look at what Net Promoter Score was designed for. This metric is used to measure customer loyalty by asking “how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?”

It’s used to gather customers’ pains and joys so software teams can sell, market, and develop a product according to the customers’ needs. But imagine if every software tool you used sent you regular NPS surveys? Response rates will suffer and the metric will slowly become less and less valuable over time.

Hiring strategies for high-performance software teams [Webinar]

Tue, 03 Sep 2019 08:00:00 +1200

“This is a sellers market. If in many cases the best developers and skilled professionals for the most part across the board are not going to tolerate a culture that does not feed them in that way, that empowers them to do good work, and they’ll move on.” — Dave Swersky, Lead Engineering Manager and Author

What to expect in this webinar

Today, our host Andre talks with Dave Swersky, Lead Engineering Manager and author, and Jeff Langston, Freelance Software Engineer, and Consultant working with freelance developer platform Gun.io.

Stay in-the-know: Introducing the Performance Matters newsletter

Thu, 29 Aug 2019 10:45:44 +1300

As you’re juggling deployments, writing code, and attending meetings there’s not a great deal of time left for staying up to date with the latest trends in tech.

The culture around performance is getting stronger — performance is absolutely a feature, yet the pressure is on to deliver more without sacrificing quality. The good news is that there are companies who have achieved their performance goals — and more. There’s a lot to learn from juggernauts like Netflix, but also the lesser-known performance pioneers breaking the boundaries of what we thought possible.

Building a great team starts with a great hire

Thu, 15 Aug 2019 10:45:44 +1300

This is a guest article by Gun.io, the experts on hiring freelance software developers for your project. In this post, Taylor pulls together quotes from engineering leaders about at the key skills engineer leaders look for beyond the tech.

The DNA of a great engineer

Hiring for any kind of technical role is never without risk.

And let’s face it, it can be daunting to assess the nuances of talent and team fit in a few simple interviews plus a code exam. So how should we think about the value differences between:

The dark art of prioritization and more: Tech leaders weigh in on software quality

Tue, 13 Aug 2019 08:00:00 +1300

The Tech Leaders’ Tour is a series of events bringing tech leaders together to learn from each other about improving software quality and customer experience.

Every software professional in a leadership role is concerned about the caliber of software that gets into the hands of customers. Questions like, is the new app slow to load? Is it working as it should? Why has churn increased? Are natural consequences of building software, yet we don’t always get the answers we need.

.NET Debugging: 6 techniques you need in your arsenal

Wed, 31 Jul 2019 08:00:00 +1200

Debugging. It’s one of the most time-consuming ways of finding a bug.

As a senior .NET developer, I can tell you that it’s best to avoid the necessity for debugging altogether by writing clean code that’s covered by automated tests. If you’re a senior developer yourself, you probably already know this. And if you’re a junior developer, now you know it too!

However, the world isn’t binary. There’s a lot of gray between the white and black that people usually like to see.

Solving complex performance problems in .NET Core [Webinar]

Fri, 26 Jul 2019 08:00:00 +1200

“It’s very much clear that .NET Core is the way going forward. Certainly new features and very much performance rated features seem to be only going in one direction. So, there’s this added incentive to move over.” - Matt Warren, performance expert at Raygun.

What to expect in this webinar

Today, our host Andre talks to Matt Warren, .NET (C#) Developer at Raygun and Microsoft MVP. Matt shares the main differences between .NET and .NET Core with a focus on the performance improvements, and how we can measure those results using Raygun.

Building better software with automated monitoring and alerting

Wed, 24 Jul 2019 08:00:00 +1200

This is a guest article by Dan Holloran from VictorOps – an on-call alerting and incident response tool recently acquired by Splunk. They are experts in incident management.

In software development and IT operations, we tend to focus a lot of our time on the delivery and deployment pipeline. But, what happens after you deploy new services? How are you responding to incidents in production and identifying reliability concerns? Effective monitoring and alerting will help you understand your applications and infrastructure – leading to better software. Then, alongside automation, monitoring and alerting practices can lead to highly-efficient, data-driven workflows.

Useful tools to manage your application's secrets

Fri, 19 Jul 2019 08:00:00 +1200

When you build and deploy an application, chances are that you need to store some form of secrets. These are typically things like credentials for 3rd party systems and database credentials.

As an ASP.NET Core developer, Microsoft provides you with an easy way to store secrets like these in your development environment, namely the Secret Manager. The Secret Manager allows to store secrets inside a JSON file on your local computer, ensuring this sensitive information is never accidentally checked into source control.

Highlights from the Raygun and AWS tech leaders' panel: Closing the gap between code and customer

Thu, 04 Jul 2019 10:45:44 +1300

The Tech Leaders’ Tour is a series of events bringing tech leaders together to learn from each other about improving software quality and customer experience.

“How much of our time are we spending on building new features versus tending to and improving what we have, versus making sure we’re investing enough to add the capabilities that teams need to scale, grow and deliver things with high quality?” Asks Josh Robb, SVP Product and Engineering at Pushpay, to over 60 tech leaders last week in Auckland.

'Monitoring is your lateral line', and more from the new book 'Achieving DevOps'

Fri, 28 Jun 2019 10:45:44 +1300

The following article is an excerpt from the book Achieving DevOps, a novel about delivering the best Agile, DevOps and Microservices, written by Dave Harrison and Knox Lively. This article is published with the author’s permission.

A lateral line is how a fish monitors the surrounding water for changes in pressure, allowing it to understand the environment. This is how fish can survive in a very harsh, always-changing environment; without it, the fish is ‘blind’ and cannot survive. In a trout or a salmon’s sphere, sudden pressure change is the KPI that alerts them to potential danger or food.

Diagnose Xamarin.Forms errors, crashes and performance issues with ease

Thu, 27 Jun 2019 09:17:09 +1300

Software quality is vital to user experience. If your users are experiencing problems with your mobile app, you simply need to know about it.

That’s why today, we’re announcing our new Raygun4XamarinForms provider for Crash Reporting and Real User Monitoring.

SQL Performance tuning: 6 Tips for tuning SQL server

Thu, 20 Jun 2019 10:45:44 +1300

SQL performance tuning can be a tricky thing. We spend so much time focusing on our business logic, it’s easy to leave the database behind in the dust. But it’s important to keep the DB in mind to maintain quality performance. We need tools in our toolbox to tune our SQL performance. In this post, we map out six tips to help you tune SQL Server.

Spot and resolve slow loading queries faster with Raygun APM

[Learn more and try Raygun free for 14 days.](https://raygun.com/platform/apm)

What is SQL performance tuning?

SQL performance tuning is the tried and true practice of changing how our application talks to our relational database so it can be more performant. We want to do this so we can meet our service-level objectives. Tuning also helps us run non-unit tests faster.

.NET Core support is here for Raygun APM

Mon, 10 Jun 2019 09:17:09 +1300

Today, we’re proud to announce the next chapter for Raygun APM – support for .NET Core. (Windows only).

Codemania 2019: What we learned from global tech leaders

Tue, 28 May 2019 10:45:44 +1300

For eight years, Codemania has brought developers and technology enthusiasts together in Auckland. This year, 500 developers arrived to network, share ideas, and solve problems with an impressive speaker lineup that included developers, authors, and global tech leaders.

As the day unfolded, we learned how Apple appears to achieve the impossible with their short product development lifecycles. We dug into empowering teams with better software leadership, and why distributed programming languages are here to stay.

Introducing granular permissions: Customize team member’s access for finer control

Mon, 06 May 2019 09:17:09 +1300

Thousands of developers work in Raygun every day. But as the number of team members added to your organization grows, it can be tough to make sure only plan Owners have access to major plan settings in Raygun.

Confidently ship code using Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD)

Wed, 01 May 2019 10:45:44 +1300

We all want to ship code on a daily basis.

As developers, we want the faster feedback cycle that comes with continuous delivery, and we know it’s better for our team and product in the long run. So why do so many development teams still have such long release cycles?

While long release cycles are tried and true and can be seen as more stable, teams sacrifice much more than faster feedback cycles.

Cultivating a high-performance culture in your software team

Tue, 09 Apr 2019 10:45:44 +1300

Chances are, you’ve had a difficult job with a difficult boss. In such a job, the environment isn’t just unpleasant, it’s demoralizing and depressing.

The culture of such a team, or even an entire company, has an enormous impact on the health and wellness of its employees.

You may not have been aware of it at the time, but your difficult boss was very likely dealing with the same situation. Difficult bosses often have even more demanding, difficult bosses.

Writing High Performance .NET Code

Tue, 12 Mar 2019 10:45:44 +1300

At some point in our careers, many of us have found ourselves working on a project that requires performance tuning. The need to write high performance .NET code should come from performance issues or business needs.

Today, we’ll take a look at just a few of the ways we can improve our .NET application’s performance. And hopefully, you’ll take away something that you can use on your current and future products. We’ll cover several best practices for writing high performance .NET code and include examples.

February Launch Notes: The latest Dashboard enhancement for RUM and more

Fri, 08 Mar 2019 09:17:09 +1300

Raygun’s Launch Notes are your regular round-up of all the improvements we made to Raygun last month—from major features to performance updates.

How to build blazingly fast software for customers

Join Matt Byers & John-Daniel Trask in a session about writing high-performance .NET code.

They’ll be exploring a mixture of both high level “code smells” that impact performance, as well as lower-level enhancements you can make to your code to make it blazingly fast for your users.

Questions to ask your APM provider before you buy

Mon, 25 Feb 2019 09:17:09 +1300

APM is something that some organizations either don’t fully understand or don’t put much thought into until it’s too late. When there’s a problem with an application, the organization scrambles to find a tool that can help solve the problem at hand. They contact the sales teams of various APM vendors to see which ones can help them.

But remember that the sales team’s job is to do their ABCs and “always be closing.” And they do a good job of it because I’ve come across many organizations over the years that have purchased an APM product but don’t have a clear understanding of what it’s doing for them or how it’s doing it.

DevOps interview questions: How to prepare

Fri, 22 Feb 2019 09:17:09 +1300

On LinkedIn, there are more than thirty thousand U.S.-based DevOps positions. That number may not be as high as it is for software developers, but it’s still higher than sysadmins or systems engineers.

Maybe this demand has you interested in switching career paths, or maybe you want to change jobs. If that’s the case, you’re in luck. Today’s post will present some common interview questions that you’ll probably get when interviewing for a DevOps position. I’ll also include some guidance on how to prepare in advance and plenty of links so you can do your research.

APM FAQ for the C-suite: Your questions answered

Thu, 14 Feb 2019 09:17:09 +1300

An often hidden cost in software development is the effort it takes for a team to debug and fix issues. As an executive, you probably want to see your features hit the market fast and hard. So when your software managers start telling you that they need to stand down, or that they can’t deliver a feature because they’re hunting down bugs, it can make you wonder if your developers are doing their job. Before you jump to conclusions, consider this: your software teams might not have the right tools for the job.

A comprehensive guide to Azure Functions error monitoring

Tue, 12 Feb 2019 09:17:09 +1300

Azure Functions is Microsoft’s solution to serverless computing. While it actually does run on servers, the key difference here is that you aren’t responsible for maintaining the function hosting environment. This is both a blessing and a curse.

On the one hand, you don’t need to burden yourself with the details of the OS and web server. This frees you up to focus on what’s important: developing the core functionality of your application. On the other hand, you have to relinquish some control over the execution environment. When it comes to logging application errors, this presents a challenge.

January Launch Notes: Announcing APM .NET Core support and more

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 09:17:09 +1300

Raygun’s Launch Notes are your regular round-up of all the improvements we made to Raygun last month—from major features to performance updates.

The latest Dashboard enhancements

The goal of the Dashboard is to allow you to customize how you display your data quickly and easily. Our latest enhancements have made the Dashboard even easier to navigate, plus we’ve added two brand new tiles: a free text tile and a paragraph tile.

Raygun's favorite features of 2018

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 09:17:09 +1300

In 2018, we launched many improvements to the Raygun Platform, including the biggest ever addition to Raygun: Application Performance Monitoring (APM).

For this article, we wanted to surface our favorite releases from 2018, just in case you missed them.

Quick navigation:

Raygun Crash Reporting

.NET Standard 2.0 and ASP.NET Core 2

This update was for developer needing to target the .NET Standard 2 APIs. The new provider targets both .NET Core 1 and .NET Core 2 applications.

Master IE11 Developer Tools

Tue, 05 Feb 2019 09:17:09 +1300

Internet Explorer 11 is an updated version of the IE web browser developed by Microsoft. And if previous versions saw you move to other browsers, then this article will help you reconsider.

The previous versions of Internet Explorer didn’t have a developer-friendly browser, but vast improvement can be seen in its latest version. The built-in developer tools in IE11 now make developing and debugging code in the browser a simple task. Internet Explorer Developer Tools now include features similar to other developer-focused browsers such as Firefox and Chrome.

3 Serverless error monitoring strategies for 2020

Tue, 29 Jan 2019 09:17:09 +1300

This article was last updated in January 2020

If you’re thinking of running a serverless setup, congratulations! But that means you’re running a distributed system.

With all the benefits and simplicities that come with going serverless comes this tradeoff: You potentially also have some increases in complexity.

Distributed systems are, by their nature, complex. With partitions, you’re communicating over a network that’s potentially unreliable and can’t be trusted. Which means that monitoring your application errors is going to be especially important.

Announcing the latest dashboard enhancements

Tue, 29 Jan 2019 09:17:09 +1300

When we first released our custom dashboard over a year ago, we had the needs of our customers in mind. The customizable tiles go a long way in ensuring that the dashboard meets your data display needs while being easy to use. We’re always improving the Raygun dashboard—here’s the latest from the app team.

SOLID design principles: Building stable and flexible systems

Thu, 17 Jan 2019 09:17:09 +1300

To build stable and flexible software, we need to keep software design principles in mind. Having error-free code is essential. However, well-designed software architecture is just as important.

SOLID is one of the most well-known sets of software design principles. It can help you avoid common pitfalls and think about your apps’ architecture from a higher level.

Raygun lets you detect and diagnose errors and performance issues in your codebase with ease

What are SOLID design principles?

SOLID design principles are five software design principles that enable you to write effective object-oriented code. Knowing about OOP principles like abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism is important, but how would you use them in your everyday work? SOLID design principles have become so popular in recent years because they answer this question in a straightforward way.

Demystifying the Raygun4Apple provider: A technical deep dive

Thu, 10 Jan 2019 09:17:09 +1300

We’ve been making changes to how we support Apple platforms now and in the future. The result of these changes is a brand new provider called Raygun4Apple.

The top 20 places to learn Java

Wed, 09 Jan 2019 09:17:09 +1300

You can learn Java online in many places. Each learning platform suits different learning styles and knowledge levels. The courses consist of Java tutorials, video lectures, code examples, interactive exercises, quizzes, Q&A forums, and web-based projects in various combinations.

Raygun lets you detect and diagnose errors and performance issues in your codebase with ease

Our comprehensive Java learning guide is part of our mission to help developers create high-quality and error-free applications. If you find the platform that best fits your interests and needs you will learn Java in a much more effective (and fun) way.

Wellington, have you seen us? Here’s the story of the Raygun neon sign

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 09:17:09 +1300

In early November, at an event Raygun hosted at Dockside restaurant, we were interviewed and featured by Television New Zealand (TVNZ) about Wellington’s booming tech sector.

As part of our contribution and commitment to the Wellington tech scene, we announced at the event that we’d be investing NZD $15 million into the local economy over the next two years.

While Raygun is a global company, we see Wellington as an important hub for us in the foreseeable future. And, as part of our vision of being a part of Wellington’s tech boom, we wanted to put our own ‘stamp’ on Wellington.

Product management tips for high-growth environments: How to tame fires

Tue, 27 Nov 2018 09:17:09 +1300

This article first appeared on the Product Management Insider blog.

As a product manager in a high-growth environment, I have come to accept that at any given time, something is on fire.

Or, at the very least, smoldering.

Five or so years ago, the team at Raygun, was just five people. Now, we’re building software products for businesses like Nordstrom. With this growth also comes many learning opportunities for a product manager like myself.

October Launch Notes: New Raygun4Apple provider, updated agent, and new default login page

Tue, 13 Nov 2018 09:17:09 +1300

Raygun’s Launch Notes are your regular round-up of all the improvements we made to Raygun in the last month — from major feature releases to performance updates.

New and improved support for Apple platforms

Fri, 09 Nov 2018 09:17:09 +1300

If you’ve ever needed to use Raygun to monitor tvOS apps, today, you’re in luck. Our new and improved Raygun4Apple provider now supports Crash Reporting and Real User Monitoring across more Apple platforms: iOS, tvOS, and macOS.

** Note: This is a major version release so there are a few changes you’ll need to make. You can find out how to make the changes in our documentation.

When you’re ready to make the change, download the installer from Raygun.

Debug iOS applications in six easy steps

Mon, 29 Oct 2018 09:17:09 +1300

In this tutorial, we’ll debug an iOS application with Apple’s Xcode. Xcode is a robust environment for developing and troubleshooting iOS applications. We’ll see how we can use it, alongside Raygun’s iOS Crash Reporting, to quickly address an application deficiency.

Raygun lets you detect and diagnose errors and performance issues in your codebase with ease

We’ll follow six steps to examine a simple application and isolate and fix a bug.

September Launch Notes: APM, zipped source maps, and more

Fri, 12 Oct 2018 09:17:09 +1300

Raygun’s Launch Notes are your regular round-up of all the improvements we made to Raygun in the last month—from major feature releases to performance updates.

What is Docker, and why is it so popular?

Thu, 11 Oct 2018 09:17:09 +1300

If you’ve been anywhere near the IT industry over the last five years, you’ve very likely heard of the container platform Docker. Docker and containers are a new way of running software that is revolutionizing software development and delivery.

Raygun lets you detect and diagnose errors and performance issues in your codebase with ease

What is Docker?

Docker is a new technology that allows development teams to build, manage, and secure apps anywhere.

Raygun Application Performance Monitoring is here

Fri, 05 Oct 2018 09:17:09 +1300

When you’re building software, there’s so much to think about — from bugs to how fast your application loads.

We’ve got something new to help your development team build better, faster experiences for your users, in less time.

Today, we’re releasing Raygun Application Performance Monitoring (APM) for .NET, a new way to visualize and understand your application’s performance on the server-side.

Using Raygun with Google Tag Manager

Thu, 04 Oct 2018 09:17:09 +1300

If you want find out if end users are running into bugs, slow page load speeds and other hidden issues, or want to discover where and why people are falling out of your conversion funnels, Raygun is going to provide much needed visibility and answers for your team.

Raygun can be integrated into your applications in various ways, from adding the code directly into your app (which only takes a few minutes), to downloading the full source. One easy method, especially if you only want Raygun to be present within certain parts of your application, is by utilising Google Tag Manager (GTM).

Server monitoring best practices: 9 dos and don'ts

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 09:17:09 +1300

Have you ever had responsibility for an application and been the last to know about an outage? I have, and it’s terrible.

You go to check your phone in the morning over coffee, after waking up, and you see a flood of missed calls and tons of emails. Customers are angry. Your boss is demanding to know what’s happening. Even the company’s executives are involved. How did this happen?

Believe it or not, this sort of thing used to be surprisingly commonplace. That was in the days before server monitoring using an Application Performance Monitoring tool became as mainstream as it is today.

5 Server Monitoring Tools for 2020 and beyond

Tue, 21 Aug 2018 09:17:09 +1300

You work on your software’s performance. But let’s face it: production is where the rubber meets the road. If your application is slow or it fails, then nothing else matters.

Are you monitoring your applications in production? Do you see errors and performance problems as they happen? Or do you only see them after users complain? Worse yet, do you never hear about them?

What tools do you have in place for tracking performance issues? Can you follow them back to their source?

Markdown Kitchen Sink

Mon, 13 Aug 2018 21:50:00 +1300

References

Headings

# Heading 1

## Heading 2

### Heading 3

#### Heading 4

##### Heading 5

###### Heading 6

Output:

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

Typography

Sup bro! But. Got a dollar for the bus?, this **random morepork** is as outrageously
awesome as a sick [seabed](http://example.com). Mean while, in The Naki,
_Sir Edmond Hillary_ and John Key were up to no good with a bunch of carked it
cheese on toasts. The pearler force of his making scones[^1] was on par with The
Hungery Caterpilar's fully sick pikelet. ~~Put the jug on will you bro, all these
thermo-nuclear craft supplies can wait till later.~~ Auto linking
https://raygun.com and : smile : emoji support is _**on**_

[^1]: the footnote text.

Output:

Webinar: Raygun and Pivotal Tracker will help you build better software

Mon, 13 Aug 2018 09:17:09 +1300

Sometimes it’s hard to balance product delivery deadlines with tackling technical debt, or quickly build features whilst maintaining code quality.

In this webinar we’ll discuss some of the challenges product managers and developers face when building software at speed within development teams. We’ll talk about some of the best practices you can employ at your own company to ease the pain surrounding efficient software delivery.

We’ll also take a look at how Raygun and Pivotal Tracker work together in harmony to streamline diagnosis of software issues, manage their resolution collaboratively as a team and deliver flawless software experiences for your customers.

New: Crash by device breakdown for easier mobile debugging

Thu, 09 Aug 2018 09:17:09 +1300

The Raygun platform is designed to surface as much actionable information about errors so, as a developer, you not only fix them quickly but gain context into what causes errors in the first place.

Today we’re announcing a new feature for both Crash Reporting and Real User Monitoring: Crash by device.

This new feature helps mobile developers understand which devices cause the most crashes, so replicating errors becomes easier.

Raygun and Java: Better error monitoring with Breadcrumbs and more

Tue, 07 Aug 2018 09:17:09 +1300

Raygun Crash Reporting has supported the Java Framework since we launched. As a Java customer, you’ve always been able to catch errors pre and post-production, receive alerts, and provide one source of truth for errors on your whole team.

Now, Raygun provides full feature support for Raygun4Java. Java customers now have access to all our favorite Raygun features, like Breadcrumbs, offline support, web service support, and sensitive data filtering.

If you need to set up Raygun4Java, go to our Java setup documentation.

This is a major version release so there are a few changes you’ll need to make. You can find out how to make the changes in the Raygun changelog.

Get more out of Git with Git aliases

Wed, 11 Jul 2018 09:17:09 +1300

One of my favorite things to do as a developer is sharing tips and tricks I have discovered that help me be more productive. Though most of us use Git on a daily basis, I’m surprised by how many developers don’t seem to take full advantage of all the great things you can do with this powerful tool.

Raygun lets you detect and diagnose errors and performance issues in your codebase with ease

One of my favorite productivity tips for Git is to use custom Git aliases.

Write for Raygun

Wed, 04 Jul 2018 09:17:09 +1300

Raygun is looking for high-quality articles to share with our audience.

We’d love to help you get your expertise into the world, so send us your tips, tricks, and ideas from the software development universe. Whether you’re a first-time author or a published pro, we’ll help you get in front of thousands of software professionals.

This guide will help you with everything you need to know about writing and submitting an article for the Raygun blog.

How to replicate user errors without the user with Breadcrumbs and Sessions

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 09:17:09 +1300

If you need to replicate a user error, you’ll know how difficult it can be to pinpoint the cause. Usually, you’d look at the stack trace or ask the user themselves. However, that’s a lot of guesswork, especially if the stack trace is obfuscated.

We’ll show you how to replicate the error faster using Crash Reporting’s Breadcrumbs and the Real User Monitoring Sessions feature.

The benefits include:

Replicate a user error much faster
Increase visibility into the cause
Triage errors with the user in mind

Note: You’ll need a Platform Plan to follow this tutorial

The Legacy Dashboard is levelling up

Tue, 19 Jun 2018 09:17:09 +1300

Last April, we launched a new feature called Custom Dashboards allowing teams to sort and view data from Raygun Crash Reporting, Real User Monitoring, and Application Performance Management. It was built as an upgrade to our Legacy Dashboard, offering better visualization, customization, and navigation.

For our customers, it’s been successful—many have made the switch from the Legacy Dashboard to Custom Dashboards. However, some teams need to use both due to some functions being available in the Legacy Dashboard only.

That’s why we recently upgraded the Custom Dashboards to include all your favorite functionality from the Legacy Dashboard. Now, there’s no need to switch back and forth between the two. To help make the transition easier, we’ll be removing the Legacy Dashboard for customers who signed up before the introduction of Custom Dashboards.

Announcing support for .NET Standard 2.0 and ASP.NET Core 2

Tue, 12 Jun 2018 09:17:09 +1300

We are excited to announce our recent support of .NET Standard 2.0 and ASP.NET Core 2 applications for Raygun Crash Reporting.

The update is for developers needing to target the .NET Standard 2 APIs. Our new provider targets both .NET Standard 1.6 and .NET Standard 2.0, so it can be used with both .NET Core 1 and .NET Core 2 applications.

At the time of writing, it is just the .NET Core provider and ASP.NET Core provider that are .NET Core 2 compatible.

What is MTTR? How to measure and improve your Mean Time to Recovery

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 09:17:09 +1300

Complex distributed systems run just about every service imaginable. Healthcare systems that monitor patient health, security systems, and financial systems are all mission-critical. Downtime, or lack of availability, loses money and can even put lives at risk.

These systems must be monitored. Many measurements are useful to keep systems running with as little downtime as possible. One of those is Mean Time To Recovery. (MTTR.)

What is MTTR?

MTTR or Mean Time to Recovery, is a software term that measures the time period between a service being detected as “down” to a state of being “available” from a user’s perspective. This measurement can then be used to calculate the financial impact on the company.

Hapi vs. Express in 2019: Node.js framework comparison

Tue, 05 Jun 2018 09:17:09 +1300

This article was last updated January 2019.

Here at Raygun, before we implement any new tool, we always run performance tests and like to share the results. This time we’re comparing Hapi vs. Express to help you make a more informed choice on Node.js frameworks.

Raygun lets you detect and diagnose errors and performance issues in your codebase with ease

Node has become a staple of the software development industry. The increased popularity of JavaScript over the past several years has propelled Node forward in terms of installed base. JavaScript and Node offer, perhaps for the first time, the opportunity to develop entire n-tier applications using a single language.

How to achieve DevOps consensus: The what and how of DevOps

Tue, 29 May 2018 09:17:09 +1300

DevOps is a complex, multi-dimensional topic. It is context-sensitive. Those who attempt to learn about and implement DevOps bring their roles and cultural perspectives to the process. Diversity of opinion and expertise can be an important advantage. However, it can also lead to friction and contention in developing DevOps consensus.

Why is DevOps consensus necessary?

Consensus is needed because DevOps is not just one thing; it’s a family of ideas that addresses a wide range of problems. Any team that works together to solve problems must first agree:

What is Real User Monitoring? Definitions, examples and benefits

Sat, 26 May 2018 13:30:09 +1300

It sucks to spend a long time building an app then get complaints about slow loading pages. You don’t know which pages the problems occur on, let alone the environment. So, software performance problems stay elusive, and linger on in your app, causing havoc for end users and your bottom line.

Real User Monitoring (RUM), surfaces performance problems and their cause in real time. Using a small piece of code, RUM anonymously collects data on your end user via their browser, then surfaces information like slow load times and performance bottlenecks in a central dashboard.

Koa vs Express in NodeJS: 2018 Edition

Fri, 25 May 2018 09:15:09 +1300

It’s time, once again, for the NodeJS benchmarking we do every year. This article will focus on two of the major NodeJS frameworks: Express and Koa. I’ll compare and contrast them, demonstrate the “ergonomics” of the code, and talk about scenarios in which you might prefer one over the other. As usual, I’ll include benchmark test results so you can take performance into account as you make your framework selection.

Everything you need to know about how Raygun is handling GDPR

Tue, 22 May 2018 13:30:09 +1300

This article was last updated December 2018

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a set of rules introduced in May 2018 designed to give EU citizens more control over their personal data. It aims to simplify the regulatory environment for business so both citizens and businesses in the European Union can fully benefit from the digital economy.

You might want to know how this affects your own obligations and those of the third party tools you use. After all, failure to comply could mean fines of up to €20 million, or 4% of the worldwide annual revenue of the prior financial year, whichever is higher!

Why building internal tools could become a costly mistake

Fri, 18 May 2018 10:30:09 +1300

Having worked closely with software developers for almost a decade, I’ve noticed some common traits amongst them.

Technically minded people think about problems in different ways. I’m often stunned how I could miss such an obvious data point or edge case when discussing product changes with people who have a far greater technical mind than myself.

I also find myself looking around for third party tools to solve problems, whereas developers like to scratch their own itches and have the skills to be able to build pretty much any tool or product themselves.

The benefits of pair programming: will it work on your team?

Tue, 01 May 2018 10:00:09 +1300

What is Pair Programming?

When you read the word “programmer,” what is the first image that pops into your mind? It would not be unusual if you imagine one person, sitting at a computer, fingers flying on a keyboard. That is a typical way for developers to write software, but it’s not the only way.

Pair Programming, also called pair coding or just “pairing,” turns software development into a team effort. Instead of one person writing code, two people collaborate in real time. One developer, the “driver,” has his/her hands on the keyboard and actually writes the code. The driver speaks as she works, sharing her thinking in real time. The other developer acts as “navigator,” watching the driver as she works. The navigator makes comments and suggestions as the driver writes the code. Pair programming isn’t new, but it is often associated with the Extreme Programming (XP) movement.

Debug JavaScript in Visual Studio in 7 easy steps [2019]

Mon, 30 Apr 2018 10:00:09 +1300

This article was last updated January 2019.

This article will focus on debugging JavaScript code Visual Studio. Traditionally Visual Studio is known for being a powerful IDE for C#.NET and VB.NET but without much support for JavaScript. However this has changed in recent iterations and now you can use Visual Studio to debug JavaScript in the same environment as you would your C# code. This makes it an extremely useful integrated tool which will speed up your bug finding and fixing process!

Announcing increased granularity in Custom Dashboards

Mon, 23 Apr 2018 09:17:09 +1300

In April 2017, we launched our Custom Dashboards feature—a way to organize and visualize your Crash Reporting, Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Application Performance Management (APM) data surfaced by Raygun, depending on your plan.

Our customers use the Custom Dashboards feature to get a high-level view of the overall health of their application. The dashboard contains tiles of data that can be changed depending on what you need your team to track. One of the most important features of tiles is to drill down to the day and even the hour that you need to gather data for.

Mocha vs Jasmine in 2018

Thu, 05 Apr 2018 09:17:09 +1300

It’s official: JavaScript is everywhere.

JavaScript has been enabling browsers for years. NodeJS brought it to the server side. TypeScript has wrapped familiar object-oriented, statically-typed syntax around it. Anywhere you look, you’ll find JavaScript: on the client, server, mobile, and embedded systems.

All good software must be tested, and software written in JavaScript is no exception (pun intended.) Many JavaScript test frameworks are available. They offer features such as:

Test runners
BDD
-Style test suites
Assertions
Spies
Fakes

Mocha vs Jasmine

Let’s take a look at two of the most popular test frameworks, Jasmine and Mocha, with an eye toward their similarities and differences.

Announcing Raygun APM: Project Proton revealed

Tue, 03 Apr 2018 10:00:09 +1300

This post was updated October 2020 with the general release of Raygun APM for Ruby.

For over five years, Raygun has been hyper-focused on helping development teams create flawless user experiences. Today, teams like Microsoft and Domino’s Pizza rely on the Raygun Platform to detect and diagnose software errors and performance problems with both real user monitoring and crash reporting tools.

We want to provide a totally integrated monitoring platform so you can grow your business, make a more significant impact in your industry, and simply be a better development team producing higher quality code.

Raygun is excited to announce the latest piece of the Raygun platform: Application Performance Monitoring (APM).

Real User Monitoring benefits: The real value to your team

Fri, 23 Feb 2018 09:18:07 +1300

This article was last updated August 2019

People often ask about the impact they should see when they implement our Real User Monitoring (RUM)tool.

In our experience, customers experience benefits like increased developer productivity, a lower cost to acquire users and better customer service. If you are wondering whether to invest in a Real User Monitoring tool, this should serve as a guide to what impact you should see.

Full visibility into software performance

Only 1% of users report performance problems. Real User Monitoring allows you to experience your apps the way your users do, so there’s no need for them to report issues for you to know what’s going on. Even simple JavaScript errors can cause a website significant problems, especially on pages with earning potential.

How we are building Raygun's secret project

Fri, 16 Feb 2018 16:01:20 +1300

If you’ve been an avid follower of Raygun or my product newsletter 😉, then you probably know that for the last little while, the Raygun team have been super busy working on a top-secret project, called Proton.

Project Proton has been an ambitious project from the beginning, and while I can’t go into the details yet, I can share the biggest lessons that we’ve learned as a company and reveal some useful tools that we’ve used along the way:

What is Application Performance Monitoring?

Fri, 02 Feb 2018 10:31:30 +1300

If a whole server becomes unresponsive, you need to know what kind of web activity caused it, and quickly. Application Performance Monitoring, or APM, gives you this visibility, and more.

APM tools monitor and manage user experiences in software applications. Unlike crash reporting, which manages the detailed information on errors, APM tools surface problems on the server side of your app.

It’s harder than ever to get visibility into the everyday workings of an application, which is why APM tools are an essential part of a development workflow.

Real User Monitoring and User Tracking: How are they different?

Tue, 16 Jan 2018 11:10:01 +1300

If you are looking through Raygun’s features and are wondering what the difference is between the Real User Monitoring and User Tracking features, this article is for you.

In a nutshell, Real User Monitoring tracks performance problems, while User Tracking helps give context to who was affected.

Both tools are part of Raygun’s Software Intelligence platform (alongside Crash Reporting and Deployments). They both use data from your app to help you better understand your user’s connection to your application and help you stand out as a software company that really cares about their users.

Raygun’s best feature releases of 2017

Mon, 15 Jan 2018 09:32:22 +1300

In 2017, Raygun launched many improvements to our platform, most of them suggested by you, our customers. Every week, we released performance tweaks, major updates, or UI improvements to the platform.

Our primary focus was giving you more control and more visibility into your data, so you can better understand how your apps are performing for your customers.

For this post, we picked several of the most significant improvements from products to new integrations. Most of these are available out of the box, so make sure you are making use of them in 2018!

Incident postmortem: Web server issue

Fri, 12 Jan 2018 15:55:42 +1300

Incident postmortem: Web server issue

On Thursday 11th January 2018 at 9 am EST, some of our customers may have noticed an issue that created intermittent 500 error pages while viewing apps and crash reports.

I’d like to let you know we have identified the cause of the problem and the issue was permanently resolved by 1 pm EST. We are continuing to investigate why this happened and will update this blog post promptly.

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