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AppSignal Error Tracking 2.0

Wes Oudshoorn

Wes Oudshoorn on

AppSignal Error Tracking 2.0

Today, we're launching a major upgrade that will improve the way your team manages application errors, with more error states, error assignments, severity labels and a "my incidents" overview.

Your team's communication around incidents will improve significantly. You'll know exactly how severe an error is, who's responsible, and how you handled this error historically.

These features are built on top of all the error tracking features we already offer, giving you both deep debugging data, and the tools to manage those errors effortlessly. Let's dive into the new features!

New Error Management Features in AppSignal

All our new features are available instantly for all customers at no additional cost. AppSignal catches errors for Ruby, Elixir, Node.js and frontend errors for JavaScript!

Tag, You're It! Assigning Errors 👨‍💻

Simply choose one or more team members and assign them an incident. This makes it clear to everyone in the development team who's handling an error. Assignments also help the next time an error occurs; you'll know exactly which team member to check in with for more information. Oh, and you can invite as many team members as you want for free in AppSignal, even on our smallest plans.

Assigning team members in exception incident

Mayday, Mayday! Severity Labels!

Is an error a critical issue or something you can safely ignore? Using severity labels, any team member who has researched an incident can mark and communicate the level of severity to your team.

Selecting severity label in exception incident

Open/Closed + WIP/Ignored 🗣

We've added an additional state so you can see if someone is working on an error. In combination with the assignments, it's very easy to see who's working on what!

  • Open (default state)

Any new incident will be "open" by default.

  • Work in progress (new state)

This state indicates that someone is working on a fix.

  • Closed

This indicates the issue is either fixed or not important anymore.

Please note that AppSignal reopens issues automatically (from closed → open) when a new notification comes in for an error.

Exception table with different severities

Incident Description

You can also add a short description to an error. Provide debugging information and context to help colleagues --- and the future-you --- handle an incident quicker.

Exception incident with description

My Assignments

A new icon in the top bar brings you to "my assignments". This gives you an overview of all assignments, from all apps. You can break down your incidents with filters like app, state, name, etc. You can even inspect other people's assignments by simply selecting their name from the dropdown.

Assigned to me page

Showing the New States Everywhere

We've gone through our alerts and our entire interface to make sure you get relevant information in all the right places:

  • You'll get an email if you're assigned an issue
  • We'll show state, severity, assignments, and descriptions for all alerts
  • We've redesigned the table to show all new information in a compact way - you can even change states from the table, and
  • You can filter the error incident overview of all of these items.

Error Tracking with a Sprinkle of Stroopwafels!

AppSignal is a team of developers building for developers --- we know how small changes can improve your team's workflow. This is why we're especially excited about this set of new error tracking features.

We know that many of you have been using workarounds like emojis or messages in Slack to assign errors and set severity levels. Well, no more. From now on, your communication around errors will be smoother than ordering stroopwafels from us. Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions or suggestions.

Wes Oudshoorn

Wes Oudshoorn

Once a rogue designer, now co-founder and manager of colors at AppSignal. If our app looks great, it's to his credit. If something is wrong, he points at developers. Loves skiing.

All articles by Wes Oudshoorn

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AppSignal monitors your apps

AppSignal provides insights for Ruby, Rails, Elixir, Phoenix, Node.js, Express and many other frameworks and libraries. We are located in beautiful Amsterdam. We love stroopwafels. If you do too, let us know. We might send you some!

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