A lot of developers confuse error and crash reporting tools with traditional logging. And it’s easy to make the relation without understanding the two in more detail.

Dedicated logging tools give you a running history of events that have happened in your application. Dedicated error and crash reporting tools focus on the issues users face that occur when your app is in production, and record the diagnostic details surrounding the problem that happened to the user, so you can fix it with greater speed and accuracy.

Most error logging activities within software teams remain just that. A log of errors that are never actioned and fixed.

Traditionally speaking, when a user reports an issue, you might find yourself hunting around in log files searching for what happened so you can debug it successfully.

Having an error reporting tool running silently in production means not only do users not need to report issues, as they are identified automatically, but each one is displayed in a dashboard, ranked by severity. Teams are able to get down to the root cause of an issue in seconds, not hours.

Full diagnostic details about the issue are presented to the developer immediately. Information such as OS, browser, machine, a detailed stack trace, a history of events leading up to the issue and even which individual users have encountered the specific issue are all made available.

In short, when trying to solve issues in your applications, you immediately see the needle, without bothering with the haystack.

Error monitoring tools are designed to give you answers quickly. Once you experience how they fit into the software development workflow and work alongside your logging, you won’t want to manage your application errors in any other way.

So next time you’re struggling to resolve problems in your apps - Think Raygun.

Your life as a developer will be made so much easier.

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