Show HN: Errordite, a new approach to exception management

https://www.errordite.com

by thackerhacker • 13 years ago

26 28 13 years ago

This looks great

OP here. In case people are wondering what the new approach is, Errordite allows you to look at your list of errors and by highlighting properties of the error define the rules by which errors are grouped into issues. See the video for a demo.

StavrosK4• 13 years ago

Hmm, I don't understand how this is different from BugSense or Sentry? Don't they already group errors together too?

thackerhacker5• 13 years ago

Yup but only automatially. Our matching default to automatic but you can redefine the matching rules.

Examples:

1. your exception messages contain the id of the entity you're dealing with "FooBar 1234 has broken". You only want to match then on the FooBar has broken bit, not the 1234.

2. for whatever reason, some IP address keeps sending you dodgy requests that break your server. You can filter all errors requests from this IP address so you don't get swamped with these errors.

3. The same bug deep down in your code is causing different errors higher up. You can choose to match on the part of your stack trace that is the common cause and get all these errors attached to the same issue.

vkothiyal• 13 years ago

looks good, best wishes

acron02• 13 years ago

I like the concept but I don't like your pricing model. For what it is, even $19 a month feels like a lot. I would love to add this to the couple of web apps I run but at that cost it'd run parallel to the cost of my AWS overhead.

Semi-seriously, you should add a PAYG model that costs by the error, thus incentivising me to make my code less error-prone!

stephanos2k2• 13 years ago

> For what it is, even $19 a month feels like a lot.

Please read http://wadefoster.net/post/49775946303/startups-you-should-v... :)

EDIT: What I am trying to say is that the comment is underestimating the value of something like an error tracker, vastly - especially when managing several web apps.

StavrosK4• 13 years ago

That response can be generalized to "you should always give people whatever they ask". What if he already is valuing the app a lot, but the app just isn't worth the price compared to other apps, or he just doesn't find it that useful?

acron02• 13 years ago

Sorry, I should have said "feels like a lot for my scenario".

thackerhacker5• 13 years ago

We considered charge-by-the-error, but felt people don't like to be nickel-and-dimed. You'd disagree?

mtrimpe• 13 years ago

If you're looking for a simple solution that gets you close some of the way here ... consider mailing every error you get to GMail.

I recently discovered that it's conversation grouping works quite decently for error messages.

ktsang• 13 years ago

This product looks great - should help avoid frustrating situations when sifting through massive error logs looking for THAT pesky bug.

fxtentacle• 13 years ago

looking at your homepage, i don't get what makes this different from airbrake.io, which i've been using for years.

I'd really love to have a well-rounded error management service (and airbrake isn't perfect), so I'm generally interested. But if you want to win me over as a customer, you might need to clarify on your homepage what's new in your approach.

Best wishes :)

stephanos2k2• 13 years ago

I'm interested: What don't you like about Airbrake? (apart from the hideous UI)

philodespotos2• 13 years ago

I'll bite. I don't particularly dislike Airbrake, but I don't particularly like it, either, and I periodically want to use something else:

1. The hideous UI. =)

2. Airbrake would 500 when trying to render the data about some of our 500s! A Rails app I work on was raising Rack exceptions about UTF-8 encodings, but viewing them on Airbrake caused it to fail, too. Meh.

3. We had to disable the JS error handler, as it would routinely take 3+ seconds to download for clients, or just time out entirely. Meh.

4. A few people on my team just never received the emails from airbrake. They were registered with the right address, it didn't go to spam, etc. It just never showed up. We gave up and switched it to mailing our foo-dev@ mailing list, and now people that have no ability to address the issue (and, honestly, mostly overreact to exceptions =) get the email, too. Meh.

See, it's just that "Meh." at the end of everything. A pretty reasonable summary of my Airbrake experience.

thackerhacker5• 13 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. Out of interest, did you read the about page or watch the video? Is it expecting too much for casual visitors to do that (genuine question)?

philodespotos2• 13 years ago

Yes (genuine answer).

I have been passively searching for a new error monitoring service, so I clicked this link from my phone while on a train to work. I'm not going to find headphones, wait on a video to load, and then hope it's high enough quality on my phone to be a useful look at what you're offering. And the About page is hidden beneath a 'Docs' menu, which is actually right next to two links that take me to a sign-in form, so it never even occurred to me to look for it. I thought 'How It Works' was all you had besides the video.

So I added it to my "hey maybe come back and look at this some day" list of TODOs. That's a very big list. I rarely actually go back and look.

Had it been two screenshots of a decent UI and a quick blurb about your (likely very useful!) grouping/filtering functionality, I'd have been much more likely to make sure I went back to view the video.

That said, I'm now watching the video, and this looks pretty nice. Good luck!

ergo142• 13 years ago

hey, if you are an airbrake user try out https://errormator.com service. We have airbrake compatible endpoint to get you started easly, but our native python client where the service really shines.

Our index page is not the best ever yet - but we were focused on delivering actual app that kicks ass. You get error collection + logging + performance metrics in a single package!

(not with airbrake api obviously - only errors part with their client but it makes it easy to switch)

lucaspiller• 13 years ago

I'd put your nav bar (at least the important bits: pricing) at the top. I just spend 3 minutes looking for it and assumed you didn't have it.

runako• 13 years ago

Since you're looking for other error management services, you might try ProjectLocker Pulse (http://www.projectlocker.com/pulse). Since Pulse is part of the ProjectLocker platform (source control, issue tracking, automated deployments, etc.), there is no extra fee or bandwidth metering for using it.

Disclaimer: I work for ProjectLocker.

jelder• 13 years ago

What your onboarding flow needs is "How this is different from X." Adding this to my app may be easy, but switching has cost (lost data, time spent, etc).

X includes at least: Honeybadger (what I use presently), AirBrake (just switched from this), NewRelic (also does what you do, and everybody uses it), BugSense, Errormator, Sentry, and I'm sure there are others in this field (for some reason).

jtheory• 13 years ago

Show HN: Errordite, a new approach to exception management

Related Stories