In the past ten years, Praeses has matured into a services company that delivers software to Fortune 500 companies. An impressive portfolio includes the US Navy, law enforcement, and startups in the oil and gas industry.

Providing excellent customer service for these customers is Praeses’ top priority. Senior Project Manager, Jeb Baugh, knows bugs and downtime can cost clients millions of dollars, so he wants to ensure incidents are few and far between. He says, “Our customers pay a premium for our services. If we push something out that prevents them from making money, we’ll hear about it quickly.”

Since implementing Raygun, we haven't had a work stoppage for years, because it allows us to be so proactive. Bad code won't even make it to testing, because issues have already been flagged by Raygun during development.

Jeb Baugh - Senior Product Manager

Proactive error monitoring

To create a successful error monitoring and alerting workflow, Praeses implemented Raygun Crash Reporting and Real User Monitoring alongside Jira Software and Slack.

Jeb says, “We’ll see an error come through Raygun, and know why it’s broken so we can fix it.” He continues, “This allows us to be proactive, and picks up a lot of things before our users even see them.”

Because Praeses is a service company, the benefits of proactive error resolution are passed on to the customer. Jeb explains that even if something does slip into production, his team can spot the issue and have a fix in place before the customer notices and has to call in for development support.

Jeb says, “I would get calls when our customers encountered a work stoppage. Depending on how customers maintain their code, I would get one to several calls per week per customer. And, for our non-technical customers, they knew there was a problem but couldn't articulate it.”

Saving time

Although customers get the downstream benefits of proactive error monitoring, Jeb has also seen benefits when prioritizing his team’s time. By receiving detailed error reports from Raygun, Jeb can now prioritize his resources by categorizing issues as critical or noncritical, and aggregating them as he sees fit using Raygun’s Error Grouping feature.

He explained, “We get a lot of Raygun errors in some of our production apps, but they are non-critical. They’re not a real error or a bug. It's maybe something to do with the jQuery library not loading something correctly but doesn't break anything.” He continued, “This helps us concentrate our resources where we can provide the customer with the most value.”

Using this system, Praeses now have just a two-hour resolution time from error detection to a fix. Praeses passes the time saved in the development phase to their customers.

The faster we can get new software into the field, the more quickly our customers realize a return on their investment. A significant portion of our business comes from repeat customers. Keeping them happy and in business keeps us happy and in business.

Performance insights with Real User Monitoring

Praeses relies on a wealth of development information to help them understand their client's needs better. Raygun Real User Monitoring (RUM) allows Praeses to gain a deep understanding of the code-level performance metrics of their customer’s applications. Praeses uses Real User Monitoring to securely surface metrics like device-specific median load time for Jeb and his team, who can then pass this information onto his clients as extra value.

By monitoring performance trends like page load time with Raygun’s performance dashboards, Jeb can spot trends in his client’s data quickly. He explained, “Real User Monitoring allows my teams to perform at a high-level by quickly addressing errors that occur during software development. It also allows me to proactively focus our resources on addressing issues, often before the customer is aware that an issue even exists.” He added, “I can't live without the Real User Monitoring. It’s very helpful.”

What would you say to another Senior Project Manager about Raygun?

“I'd tell them Raygun’s an excellent tool. It's cost-effective for finding errors and avoiding them before they get to production.” He continued, “It's only going to help your software teams get better, especially RUM, which I can’t live without. We see Raygun as an extension of our team and our company.”