Unique user tracking for exceptions and crashes

The sharp-eyed among you will notice the Raygun client libraries have gained a new method for unique user tracking!

Click on an error group and you’ll notice a count of how many users were affected by the error!

Unique user tracking is a really powerful feature for both web and mobile applications. Knowing if 10 errors is impacting 10 users, or just 1 user who keeps hitting something that is broken can make the difference in deciding the priority of the fix. Ultimately, Raygun is all about improving the user experience of software and that means that users are the ultimate measure of error impact.

Anonymous or personalized

Not all applications have users who are logged in, or perhaps you simply don’t want to track exact users. That’s fine – our provider’s default to generating a random, anonymous ID (if it’s in an environment where it can be stored), and this is used to generate the count.

If you do wish to identify a user simply call a SetUser(string) function (casing is idiomatic for the language), passing in the current user identifier, which will be held for the life of the provider object.

In the first dashboard screenshot above, you can see that there were 20 anonymous users, two of which we could identify.

We recommend setting an email address, if possible. If we see an email address we’ll display the associated Gravatar so you’ll even see their picture and email address below the user count. It’s never been easier to understand how bugs are impacting actual users of your software.

Constantly evolving

We’re looking forward to seeing how you use User Tracking and have plans to extend the feature further. We’d love to hear your feedback on this cool new feature!

Give it a try

The providers have been updated to transmit the user, so update your project with the latest provider version and call SetUser() (if needed for the provider). Check the documentation at the provider’s GitHub repository for exact instructions for each provider. If you’re new to Raygun, as always there’s a 30-day free trial available here, no credit card needed.