Guide
What is error monitoring?
Error monitoring is the practice of automatically capturing exceptions from running software, grouping identical failures into issues, and attaching enough context — stack trace, user, release, preceding events — to diagnose each one without reproducing it locally.
Error monitoring versus logging
Logging records what your application chose to write down. Error monitoring records what went wrong, whether or not anyone anticipated it. The practical difference is aggregation: a log file gives you ten thousand lines, an error monitor gives you one issue that occurred ten thousand times, with a count, a trend and a list of affected users.
What a useful error report contains
The exception type and message alone are rarely enough to fix anything. A report worth having carries the resolved stack trace, the release, the environment, the user or tenant, the request context and the sequence of events that preceded the failure.
- Exception type, message and resolved stack trace
- Release and environment the event came from
- The user or tenant affected
- Breadcrumbs: the events leading up to the failure
- First seen, last seen and frequency
Grouping and fingerprinting
Grouping is what makes error monitoring usable. Events are fingerprinted on the exception type and the application frames of the stack trace, so the same logical bug stays one issue. Grouping too aggressively hides distinct bugs; grouping too loosely produces a list nobody reads.
Why event count is a poor priority signal
The most common mistake in triage is sorting by event count. A retry loop in a background job will out-produce your checkout flow by an order of magnitude while affecting nobody. Affected user count is better. Affected users weighted by how much the feature is actually used is better still.
Where ErrorDock fits
ErrorDock is an error monitoring platform that also collects performance and product usage data, which is what lets it rank issues by real impact rather than by volume.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between error monitoring and APM?
- Error monitoring focuses on failures — exceptions and crashes. Application performance monitoring focuses on timing — how long operations take. They overlap and are frequently sold together, because a slow endpoint and a failing endpoint are often the same endpoint.
- Do I still need logging if I have error monitoring?
- Yes. Logs capture intentional narrative and audit trails; error monitoring captures unanticipated failure. Most teams use error monitoring for triage and logs for the detail once they know where to look.
- What are breadcrumbs in error monitoring?
- Breadcrumbs are the ordered trail of events recorded before an error — navigation, network requests, log statements and user interactions — which together describe what the user was doing when the failure occurred.
Related
- Find the failure. Keep the context. Group exceptions into issues, inspect stack traces and breadcrumbs, and understand which users and releases are affected.
- .NET error monitoring. How exception handling, logging and error monitoring fit together in .NET, and what to capture from an ASP.NET Core application.
- React error monitoring. Error boundaries, component stacks, source maps and what React error monitoring actually needs to capture in production.
- What is application monitoring? Application monitoring covers the signals that describe whether software is working: errors, performance, availability and usage. How the pieces fit together.
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