Writing · Product
Launching CrashLog
Today we are excited to announce the public launch of CrashLog.
Originally published on the CrashLog blog. Recovered from the Internet Archive and republished as written, so it reflects the tools and thinking of the time.
Today we are excited to announce the public launch of CrashLog.
As our name suggests we capture errors occurring in your web, mobile, server-side, and desktop applications, along with a detailed analysis to help you get to the cause as quickly as possible.
Never miss an exception
As a developer, one of your highest priorities once your product is in the hands of customers is reacting to issues before the customer even has the chance to ping you on Twitter. This goes hand in hand with delivering a good customer experience.
So it goes without saying that if you don’t get notified, and you don’t spend your days tailing logs — then you’re probably going to miss something important.
Which is where we come in.
Capture everything
CrashLog was designed to support a generic set of interfaces from common languages to allow you to send arbitrary events and have them automatically correlated with similar events, system components, and users.
We’re still young, but our small team is adding great futures by the day. Some things we shipped this week:
Backtrace contexts
Backtrace contexts allow you to expand any backtrace line and see the code surrounding that line instantly, even from within supporting libraries.
User contexts
If the exception was triggered by an authenticated user you can send a few details to allow you to identify them and be proactive about making sure their experience did not lose you a sale, or worse.
Very soon you will be able to filter exceptions by specific users.
Ruby/Rails and Java support delivered, more in development
Our open source plugins for common languages are in active development, with Java (Thanks Mark Wolfe) and Ruby support available now with seamless integration into Rails and Rack based applications.
Our own stack consists of more than just Ruby on the backend and Javascript on the front-end, and we know yours probably does too which is why we have a roadmap for extending support to all common frameworks from web to mobile and desktop.
If you want to see support for something we don’t already have a repository for, checkout our API documentation, it’s really quite straight forward.
A rich user experience
As a developer I often come across tools with a user experience very much designed to meet what interaction designers would call the ‘Implementation model’ — a button for every action. While the learning curve for interfaces like this is quite steep we’re usually happy to master them. However I want to see this landscape change, which is why as a key to the experience of CrashLog, and the simplicity of our service, we have spent considerable time refining the CrashLog UI.
But we’re only just getting started, in the coming weeks we’ll not only be adding more languages and frameworks to our officially supported plugins, but we also have some very unique features in the pipeline which I am truly excited to release.
I would like to thank everyone who has used CrashLog over the last couple of months while we prepared for an official release and the valuable feedback we received has helped shape this service to what it is today.