For more than 30 years, SMART Technologies have helped educators achieve better results with technology products that support student-centered learning.

Their success is driven by a deep commitment to engagement with both the business and education communities. SMART Technologies boasts over 5 million software downloads annually, which makes Senior Software Developer Ben Schuiling driven to ensure the customer’s experience is an excellent one - regardless of time or location.

Ben recognized the need for a crash and error reporting solution that would give his team the ability to deliver the standard of software expected of SMART Technologies.

After realizing their current monitoring tool wasn’t performing to the required standard, Ben decided to try Raygun. A quick demo to the team was all Ben needed to get Raygun implemented across all SMART Technologies’ applications.

Raygun was the only tool that checked all the boxes - we are very happy with the product, so we never went anywhere else

Ben Schuiling - Senior Software Developer

Ben needed better data mapping and support for JavaScript Source maps

Before Raygun, Ben was finding his current crash reporting solution was making it difficult to backtrace obfuscated JavaScript code. Although it was doable, the team was losing valuable time attempting to recover any meaningful data needed to locate problems quickly.

Ben recalls: “The biggest issue we were facing was trying to (utilize) the data we were getting from our existing provider in terms of (relating the) call stacks back to something meaningful so that we can go and fix the problems we were seeing.”

With Raygun, Ben can access the de-obfuscated JavaScript he needs to locate issues quickly with Raygun's Error details pages.

SMART Technologies puts their customers first with customer experience monitoring

For SMART Technologies, it’s all about the end user’s experience. Ben uses features like Customers (a standard feature to all Raygun plans) which enables Ben’s team to track which errors affected which customers, and the navigation path they took to encounter the error. Being able to understand the exact environment in which the error occurred means replicating errors is much easier.

Does this give SMART Technologies an advantage over competitors? Ben thinks so.“It is extremely valuable to understand what has gone wrong on a customer's browser. Our end users are teachers in classrooms, so when things go wrong, they can’t put the class on hold and call us.”

Ben also uses the Customers feature to triage errors. He sorts the errors using the Crash Reporting Dashboard and places a priority on errors occurring frequently to a significant amount of users.

We want to get a temperature check about what our customers may or may not be seeing and put our efforts into errors that are a high priority. For this, we use the affected user area a lot to see the impact of an error on our customers.

Ben saves development time by prioritizing important errors

Many of Raygun’s customers agree that spending time looking through the code for errors can be a waste of valuable developer resources. Especially when chasing errors that may not be a priority. Ben uses Raygun to get a deeper understanding of the overall health of SMART Technologies applications - including where bottlenecks and inefficiencies may be:

“The biggest thing we discovered by using Raygun was that we were paying attention to too many things. We realized we didn’t care about errors coming from third-party libraries because they were artificially inflating our error rates. With Raygun, we were able to filter those out.”

Would Ben recommend Raygun to another Senior Software Developer?

“Yes, I would recommend Raygun. Raygun offers the flexibility to set up your development environment as you wish while being able to gather metrics for your customers in a meaningful way. That helps you build higher quality software.”