Whether you’re developing a quick module, application, or full blown, go-to-market product, you’re going to need some form of event logging throughout the development process. It can be done without, but you’ll be making your job multiple magnitudes more difficult and losing valuable man hours that could be put towards making your product better instead of just not breaking.
Event logging provides a detailed record of events, bugs, and custom triggers that occur in your application, environment, or product. The information collected gives you a wealth of data to both forensically troubleshoot a bug after it’s occurred as well as proactively to prevent future errors.
This now service is now an invaluable resource to increase your development team’s efficiency and productivity as well as increasing visibility of what goes on behind the scenes in your development environment. On top of that, it also helps maximize application uptime and operation by minimizing the long-term effects of bugs and unwanted events.
Individual raw event logs are too dense and unwieldy to be reviewed. If you were to rely on the raw data, you’d need to specifically hire someone to dig through all that info to pass on the important info to your developers. Event tracking software will parse the data and catalog the important information in an intuitive manner to make everyone’s lives easier. In a nutshell, it will shine a light on the needle in your proverbial haystack.
The great thing about event tracking is that it’s running around the clock. When you and your team aren’t in the office, it’s keeping a watchful eye on your project and collecting data 24/7. It collects data from all sources across your development environment and all of this data is funneled to your dashboard for real-time reporting and criteria based sorting. This allows you to both find the event you’re looking for and quickly dive into its potential causes.
Exceptionless groups common events into stacks based on where the event occurred and the type of error. This cleans up and consolidates the data on your dashboard and in your reports to keep it from being cluttered as well as keeping that information in a single place for your analysis. Even though the event’s footprint is smaller, you’ll still be able to identify larger iterations of the same event to prioritize your work.
It can be incredibly difficult to replicate an event that a user encountered. There’s a slew of information you need to accurately track the cause and the user simply may not, or cannot, provide it. You could spends hours or days just trying to isolate what triggered an event. Hours that could have been put towards building a new feature or getting your product to market.
Event tracking software makes it so a bug that once took a week to find can be found, patched, and pushed live in a matter of minutes or hours instead of days or weeks. Spend less time on maintenance and more time innovating.
Your developers’ time is valuable, and expensive. Even though it’s important, having them blindly diving down rabbit holes to chase bugs and other events can be incredibly costly and not productive. Not every project has a big budget and you may have to work faster and more efficiently to wrap it up without going over budget. While an event logging software may sound like an additional expense, the amount of time you save troubleshooting and fixing bugs will easily cover the cost. And the great thing is, the more you use it, the more you save.
All the information in the world won’t help you if it’s impossible to dig through. We specifically built our dashboard to give a clear high level view of your application while still being clear the further you drill down into individual events and bugs. You can quickly view the health of your application, track data from actually users, and intelligently drill down into recent errors. It seamlessly unites metrics and productivity while you analyze and explore data to rapidly troubleshoot your application.
Bugs, exceptions, issues, faults, errors, incidents, whatever you want to call them, they’re unavoidable. No matter how elegantly you think you wrote your code, no matter how many user cases you think you’ve covered, your application is going to have bugs and part of our jobs is to find those bugs and fix them. You can track these bugs using an Excel or Google sheet (if you’re a glutton for punishment), but the best way is to use a bug tracking platform that tracks, records, reports, and manages these exceptions for you.
In its simplest form, bug tracking is when a developer is alerted to an event when their code does not operate as intended. They catalog the issue, collect as much information as they can that led to said event, and attempt to recreate it so they can fix the problem.
As you can imagine, doing all of this manually becomes quite unwieldy the larger an application gets. On top of that, with larger applications comes additional layers of complexity that a user simply can’t account for or give you the proper information to set you on the path for resolving their bug. This is why it’s so important to have an automated event tracker.
A bug tracking software of any kind is a must have for any sort of application at any stage of development, even months or years after it goes live. The larger your product, the more important it is to have some form of bug tracking implemented. (This is also a tell tale sign of whether or not a development team is worth their salt.)
You can spend hours, days, weeks, and even months trying to track down a bug if you don’t have the right information. Having a software platform in place for tracking bugs helps your development team work smarter and faster when troubleshooting these issues. The software will record, document, and organize these bugs automatically with critical information about the user, event, and the application at the time it occurred. No more chasing down info. It’s already done for you!
C# is one of, if not the most used programming language of the last 15 years. It’s an elegant object oriented language that allows developers to build .NET applications. While it can be daunting at first if you aren’t familiar with it, it’s actually quite simple to use and relatively easy to learn. However, the applications can get quite complicated because of its structure. A misplaced bracket, variable, or object can cause cascading issues that aren’t easy to detect or remedy.
Due to the potentially complicated landscape that is a C# application, detecting, diagnosing, and fixing a bug can be a near-Herculean task, especially if you aren’t the developer that originally created said application. It may have been coded in a non-optimal way or due to time constraints, it had to be done in a hacky way that’s just waiting to implode. This is where a bug tracking solution for your C# application is an invaluable addition to your infrastructure.
You can’t be everywhere at once and see everything, especially in the larger C# applications. Having C# bug tracking software guarantees that you can be with it collecting data in the background. Regardless of when a bug occurs, our platform will have a full report with everything you need to set your development team in the right direction.
Exceptionless’ automated bug tracking already tracks an enormous amount of contextual information automatically, but you can track even more information by creating a custom object. If you want to grab info on what was in a customer’s before it threw a bug, custom object. Once created, you can set these objects as top level tabs to improve their visibility.
Every bug is intelligently tracked on our dashboard and consolidated into stacked groups based on where it occurred and the type of bug. Not only does this keep things nice and tidy, but it also lets you triage whether or not a bug needs to be fixed as soon as possible. These reports also persist after the bug has been fixed so you have historical data just in case the bug resurfaces later.
Our bug reports extensively tracks a robust set of information to help you quickly track down and fix the error. The default information covers type of error, stack trace, date, request information, and environment information, but that can easily be expanded upon and tailored to your application with custom objects.
We have extensively documented our platform and API to make it easy and painless to use. You can use our fluent API to easily add custom objects, tags, and other information as well as marking certain errors as vitally important.
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Troubleshooting and fixing bugs is part of our jobs as developers and, as the saying goes, we need to work smarter, not harder so we can spend more time creating new features to our applications rather than patching errors. Exceptionless’ C# bug tracking software will intuitively, and automatically, organize any bugs that do occur to help you pinpoint the cause so your application can get back on track.
Bug tracking. Two words that you’ll never be able to escape as a developer. Our goal as developers is to always create a high quality product with pristine code, but let’s face it, nobody’s perfect and accidents happen. Bugs are going to pop up no matter how hard we work or how much we plan ahead. They’re an inevitable part of the job and the more complex your project becomes, the more likely unexpected bugs are to start popping up.
You can try and track these little annoyances manually, like some kind of an animal, or use a bug tracking software to significantly speed up the process and provide a log of what happened and where to prevent future iterations of the same issue.
At its core, bug tracking is when a developer tracks, logs, and resolves a bug or issue that caused their software to not perform as intended. This could be as simple as a missing semicolon or trailing slash or as complicated as a vulnerability in your back end.
In the old days of yesteryear, there weren’t any (good) bug tracking software platforms so developer had to exhaustively QA test their code before publishing and even then, they couldn’t catch everything. Bugs sometimes went to production undetected and they relied on users to report issues so they could investigate them manually later. As you can imagine, this was an incredibly time consuming and tedious process that ate up far too much time and resources that could have been spent developing the next great feature to propel sales.
At the risk of sounding pretentious, Kurt Vonnegut said that "Everyone wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance." Whether we like it or not, we can’t always build the next big feature or streamline the functionality of our platform. Sometimes we have to hunt down elusive bugs and do maintenance to keep our code clean and keep a solid foundation so we can keep building.
Ignoring or intentionally leaving bugs to multiply in the code can damage your company’s reputation (and revenue) if one of these errors affects your customers’ ability to do their job or compromises their information. It will save everyone involved a ton of time, money, and headache if you simply implement a bug tracking software from the get go. Your code will stay clean and you’ll stop losing users, leads, and customers. It’s a win / win for everyone.
ASP.NET is a coding model used to build enterprise class applications with minimal coding. This not only cuts down on the amount of man hours necessary to complete your project, but also simplifies running and maintaining said application due to its (relative) simplicity. If you’re new to the ASP.NET platform, do not be surprised if it’s not the easiest thing to pick up, but once you do, you’ll understand why it’s one of the most popular development platforms out there. (There are a ton of tutorials & learning environments if you’re looking to learn the platform.)
Just because ASP.NET is a simplified coding platform doesn’t mean that you won’t have bugs. If anything, it can make them a bit tougher to find, but that’s where having an integrated bug tracking suite comes into play.
Our bug tracking software suite helps development teams find, record, and categorize bugs and errors in real time for your ASP.NET websites, applications, and services. It organizes information in an intuitive and easy to digest dashboard to help your platform become exceptionless.
Bugs can happen anywhere at anytime and if you aren’t watching, they can go unnoticed for months, sometimes years. Our bug tracking software runs in the background of your ASP.net platform 24/7/365 so if something happens, we have a full report with the data you need to craft surgical solution with ease
Once a bug has been discovered and tracked, there’s no need to attempt to replicate the issue. A detailed report is automatically created that intelligently organizes important information to help resolve the bug.
Curious about what else is captured in our reports? Check out the full write up on our detailed error reports.
For ease of browsing, our platforms groups errors together based on a variety of criteria, i.e. date, type, platform, browser, etc. to help you drill down and pinpoint the cause of bugs in your application. It also keeps a full history of the exception even after it’s been resolved in case it resurfaces in the future.
You no longer have to worry about your customers letting you know about bugs or checking a dashboard every morning. Simply update your notification settings and get instant emails when an error happens, only when new errors happen, or not at all. You can even flag resolved errors to send emails in the event that regress to their previously broken state.
Bugs are an inescapable part of any ASP.NET application, but they don’t have to be an unmanageable nuisance. Implementing an error tracking solution will help you organize bugs as they occur while providing vital information that will help you pinpoint the cause and quickly resolve them. Keep your development teams updating your application with new features with an ASP.NET bug tracking software.
We've added .NET Standard 2.0 support, which allows you to easily integrate with UWP applications now.
Microsoft.Extensions.Logging support has also been added via the Exceptionless.Extensions.Logging client. Thank you @moogle001 for contributing to this feature!
Thanks to @jamierushton, we now allow null and default values to be serialized, which translates to greater insight into contextual data.
We're now using GitLink to debug packages more easily.
If you are using our hosted service, you do not need to upgrade anything on your end. If you are self hosting Exceptionless and upgrading from version 2 or 3, you should just have to update your NuGet packages. See our upgrade guide for more information.
Since we first introduced Slack integration with the goal of further improving notifications in Exceptionless, we've come back around with updates, a few bug fixes, and wanted to give everyone a quick all-in-one overview of the feature!
Thanks to everyone that has provided feedback, bug reports, and suggestions. If you have any, don't hesitate to submit an issue over on GitHub. We're always looking to improve and would love your input!
Along the way, we have run into incoming webhook issues, some usability/setup workflow updates that needed to be made to make the process more usable, and, among other things, incorrectly created action URLs that weren't being handled correctly with rate limiting.
Then, click on "Add Slack Notifications" and log in to your slack team.
Once logged in, you will need to select the channel you want Exceptionless Notifications to post to and click Authorize.
Once authorized, you can then configure the different notification settings by going back to the Exceptionless app and into the project's integrations tab again.
Once integrated and configured, notifications will look something like the below screenshot, with the message, type of event, stack trace, links to actions, etc.
We're excited to keep improving notifications, and would love for you guys to continue testing and providing feedback! What else would you like to see happening with notifications? What are we doing right, and wrong?
Integrations with other chat & productivity tools like HipChat and Microsoft Teams are on our list, as well, so if you use these please ping us and let us know so we can gauge interest!
Recently, we released Exceptionless.JavaScript 1.5. The major update for the release was the addition of universal JavaScript (React Universal) support! More details below. The key is that we can now run in server side node apps, or in the browser, with a single script and do the right thing!
TL;DR: Isomorphism is the functional aspect of seamlessly switching between client- and server-side rendering without losing state. Universal is a term used to emphasize the fact that a particular piece of JavaScript code is able to run in multiple environments. - Gert Hengeveld, Isomorphism vs Universal JavaScript
We have gotten lots of requests for Universal JavaScript support. What this means is that you can use a library in the browser or server without any changes from the end user. This is great because you can just consume the library and just know it will work using the same API service no matter where you want to use it. The main con of using a universal client is the increased payload size as you know have to send node support to the browser as well.
We implemented universal JavaScript support by bundling both the browser and node scripts together. But it wasn't as easy as concatenating the files together. We had to refactor the node and browser entry points so that they would automatically run, while ensuring that the initialization of environment specific code (storage, network, etc.) only ran when specific environment conditions were met. This is pretty easy to do with an IIFE function and a quick if check as shown here. Next, we needed to provide a new entry point that imported both of the entry points which ensures that browser and node entry points run.
This update adds support for universal apps, and a React Universal sample that shows the exact changes that were required to get everything working and setup can be found here. The pull request for universal support can be found here.
To target it, you just need to reference the universal script (exceptionless.universal.js), this will happen automatically if you install via browserfiy or webpack.
Blake's been busy lately, including some work on one of our other projects, CodeSmith Generator, to update Exceptionless to the latest version. Naturally, this got him thinking about other potential improvements while we were doing work on Serilog Sink for Exceptionless and Foundatio.Redis, as well.
While updating our WPF application, CodeSmith Generator, to the latest version of Exceptionless, Blake brainstorms several improvements that could be made to help take advantage of plugins, isolate Exceptionless from other plugins, etc.
We have been tweaking the recent Slack integration over the past month or so, and this week we noticed that action URLs being created incorrectly and failures weren't being handle correctly with rate limiting. So, those two issues have been tweaked and should be working much better now.
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