Error monitoring software: What to look for

What is error monitoring software?

Error monitoring software facilitates the process of identifying known and novel issues in your web or mobile application so you can fix them as quickly as possible. Tracking errors is crucial to optimizing your application’s performance and providing a smooth, problem-free user experience.

As your application attracts more users or becomes more dynamic, tracking errors can become increasingly challenging. Having the right error monitoring software in place from the start can help you ensure your app remains performant as it scales and that issues are quickly resolved before they impact your business goals.

Error monitoring software features to look for

While there are certain core features that any error monitoring software should offer, you should also look for some other key capabilities that will help you streamline workflows and collaborate effectively across teams. The tool you choose should let you:

• Collect essential data to help you diagnose and fix errors effectively, including stack traces, metadata, frequency histograms, and more
• Filter and search through collected data to quickly find the information you need
• Discover novel issues and properly scope the impact and reach of a problem to prioritize an appropriate solution
• Receive real-time alerts and notifications for impactful or potentially severe errors
• Set up and customize dashboards that help you visualize data to quickly identify patterns and problems
• Integrate with support tools, version control systems, project management platforms, and communication channels
• Replay user sessions to understand the “why” behind errors and analytics and see exactly how real users experience those errors
• Cut through noisy data so you can focus on the most impactful issues

The best error monitoring software will let you do all of the above while minimizing the impact on your application’s performance. However, there are some limitations with traditional error monitoring solutions that you should keep in mind.

Problems with traditional error monitoring software

Limited insight into frontend errors

Monitoring backend errors is relatively straightforward since all server-side code runs on a single platform. While you may find it useful to monitor and address these issues, remember that not all backend errors will affect the user experience.

Unfortunately, traditional error monitoring solutions tend to be limited in their frontend telemetry. As a result, when frontend errors occur, they tend to go unnoticed and unreported despite often having a major negative effect on UX. Even error monitoring software that can surface frontend issues can’t always help you understand their root cause, which makes it difficult to diagnose and fix problems at their source.

Incomplete context

Many error monitoring tools alert teams to every error with no context as to the user or business impact. Additionally, without more advanced features and capabilities such as session replay or real-time monitoring, you may find it challenging to understand user-specific factors such as the device they were using or their actions leading up to the error.

It’s important to focus your resources on the problems that have the greatest impact on your UX and overall application performance. Without this crucial context, however, it can be challenging to identify, reproduce, prioritize, and resolve high-severity issues.

Lack of agility and ability to collaborate

Error monitoring software with limited collaboration and integration features can lead to wasted resources and inefficient workflows. For example, different teams often encounter similar errors, but without a single source of truth to support cross-team collaboration, they may end up working separately to resolve them.

In other situations, teams may depend on each other in the issue resolution process. Critical delays in one team’s workflow can impact the productivity of another team, which may cause the vital issues that really need attention to continue hurting performance for days or weeks.

Why choose LogRocket as your error monitoring solution?

LogRocket monitors web and mobile apps in production to help you quickly detect and resolve errors. You can access the same quantifiable metrics as other error monitoring software and see relevant data displayed with common visualization structures such as charts, dashboards, and more. Beyond this, LogRocket also integrates session replay and product analytics features, such as conversion funnels, heatmaps, and path analyses, to help you better understand the user experience and dig deeper into the root causes of errors.

When an error occurs, you can access all the code-level detail alongside high-fidelity reconstructions of real user sessions to see exactly what your users experienced and the technical context for why. Additional data, such as the issue’s scale and its impact on key business goals, can help you determine whether a bug is worth fixing and how to collaborate most efficiently across teams to quickly ship a fix.

Moreover, LogRocket Galileo automatically identifies, aggregates, and tracks errors over time, applying machine learning to user interaction patterns so you can detect and resolve severe problems before users experience and report them.

While traditional error monitoring software often generates a high volume of false-positive alerts, LogRocket has analyzed over a trillion user interactions to build a machine learning module that delivers you only the most impactful user-facing problems that need your immediate attention.

Ultimately, LogRocket’s error monitoring software provides a more complete understanding of the errors impacting your goals. Your whole team can get the information they need to easily route alerts and errors to the right person, determine the impact of particular errors, and prioritize and communicate more effectively. Streamline workflows, optimize UX, and make informed decisions with confidence that you’re spending your time where it matters most.

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