This post was written by Rahul Chhabria from Sentry, our marketplace partner. Find and fix errors in your code faster with the Bitbucket-Sentry integration.
Consumers of software products have more options than they can name. If a much-beloved food delivery service crashes, there are at least six others to choose from. If a rideshare service stalls, you open up a competitor app and call a car.
Typically, when an app crashes, a customer reports the issue and then your team scrambles to react. This creates a never-ending loop between the customer, support teams and engineering teams. But by the time you comb through logs to debug the issue and deploy a solution, the customer has already moved on to your competitors service.
Types of monitoring tools
"But Rahul, we're monitoring our systems. We can tell when there are spikes in systems data and go from there. So how did we still lose this customer?" Yup, I get it. That makes total sense. There are three common types of monitoring tools:
- Systems monitoring: Tools dedicated to monitor hardware performance.
- Log monitoring: Tools that aggregate logs and can be searched on, but aren't optimal for triaging and remediating errors/exceptions/crashes. Mainly because they neither contain in-application context nor group/aggregate similar errors.
- Application Performance Monitoring: Tools that track operational metrics within those systems like the number of requests, transaction volumes, and overall application health.
But none of these tools actually monitor your code i.e. where errors originate, and where you'll need to fix them. Software teams at the largest streaming services, leading developer tools, and gaming companies that support millions of users at any given point in time are bolstering their monitoring suite with error monitoring software.
What are Error Monitoring tools?
Error monitoring tools surface runtime errors and/or crashes within your application. In-application context is sent alongside the error, giving developers all necessary information to determine the cause, place, and impact of any given error, as well as any noteworthy patterns.
A sophisticated error monitoring tool like Sentry provides:
- Number of customers over time impacted by a given issue
- The clients that are experiencing the error
- A full stack trace
- When paired with an SCM tool like Bitbucket Cloud, the tool can also tell you specific commit that probably caused the bug
- Integrates with your workflow critical applications: Slack, Jira Software, Trello, OpsGenie, Bitbucket, and others.
Why you need it
Error monitoring software helps developers diagnose, fix, and optimize the performance of their code. With a tool like Sentry, software teams can easily trace issues related to software errors and identify trends in code quality. This results in speeding up resolution times from days to minutes, frees up dev cycles and ultimately leads to happier customers.
At Sentry we like to say, "Your users won't thank you. In fact, they won't say anything at all." We think that's a great thing. With error monitoring and software collaboration tools, your customers don't have to be an extension of your QA team. Your engineering team will have peace of mind knowing that their code works. And most importantly, you ship a flawless customer experience.
Start Monitoring your Code
Learn more about the Bitbucket Sentry integration.
