When developing mobile apps it’s important to monitor errors so that you can understand your user’s experience. You need deeper insight than just a crash report because errors could cause a degraded user experience or a drop in key behavioral metrics. Your team needs to know quickly when there are production problems either with the app itself or with your backend services so you can fix the issue before more customers are impacted.

Rollbar’s Android SDK lets you track and analyze errors that happen in your Android native applications, and even trace problems to backend services and third party APIs. It provides you with a live error feed from your application, including complete stack traces and contextual data to debug errors quickly. We also track the environment the error is coming from (prod or staging), the server that generated the error, and even the user’s session data. You can then quickly assign ownership of errors to your team and track when they are fixed. Learn more about Rollbar’s product features for Android.

Below, you can see that we've created an example app that triggers an exception when the user clicks on a button. The error message is tracked in Rollbar, including a stack trace where you can see the line of code that caused the error. Rollbar captures errors that occur anywhere in the app. You can follow along with our example using the source code on GitHub.

We're happy to introduce Jesse Gibbs, our Head of Product, who has been with Rollbar two years this May . In addition to leading the product team, Jesse is the day-to-day product owner for new feature development in the Rollbar web app.

To give back to our community of developers, we looked at our database of thousands of projects and found the top 10 errors in Ruby on Rails projects. We’re going to show you what causes them and how to prevent them from happening. If you avoid these "gotchas," it'll make you a better developer.

Because data is king, we collected, analyzed, and ranked the top 10 Ruby errors from Ruby on Rails applications. Rollbar collects all the errors for each project and summarizes how many times each one occurred. We do this by grouping errors according to fingerprinting. Basically, we group two errors if the second one is just a repeat of the first. This gives users a nice overview instead of an overwhelmingly big dump like you’d see in a log file.

We focused on the errors most likely to affect you and your users. To do this, we ranked errors by the number of projects experiencing them across different companies. We intentionally looked at the number of projects so that high-volume customers wouldn't overwhelm the data set with errors that are not relevant to most readers.

Here are the top 10 Rails errors:

You’ve probably noticed some familiar faces in there already. Let’s dig in and take a look at the errors in a bit more detail to see what might cause them in your production application.

Every app is imperfect and generates errors, but do you know how errors affect your users and business? When you look at logs for a large application, you might see thousands of errors per day and not know where to start. Even worse are errors that are not tracked by your application. They could be buttons that stop working, input that isn’t saved, or any number of other issues. Without proper error tracking, you are flying blind to these user experience problems.

Unfortunately, developers who are deep in the code are not expected to understand how these errors impact users, and ultimately, their company’s finances. Even if they know of an error that should be fixed, it can be difficult to articulate why they should be fixed instead of developing a new feature. Here are five ways developers can advocate to management about the importance of fixing errors.

Originally from Armenia, David Karapetyan is a software engineer who enjoys improving and streamlining systems. Since joining Rollbar in January of this year, David has been working to make things simpler, faster, and cheaper for our backend systems.

This is a guest post by Derek Haynes from Scout, an APM that integrates with Rollbar.

When New Relic launched ten years ago, web applications had a tendency to fail hard and in more obvious ways:

Today, it's easier to build resilient apps, but they fail in more complex, unique, and subtle ways. These issues are time-consuming to track down. While several niche New Relic alternatives have appeared, they've focused on a lighter feature set versus solving these increasingly hard performance problems.

Unlike existing "New Relic Lite" alternatives, Scout approaches performance monitoring much like Rollbar's best-of-breed error monitoring. Scout is designed to drastically reducing the investigation time for these complex performance issues.

Let's investigate a modern-day performance issue with Scout and compare the experience to New Relic.

Ivan Gomez is a people person. Since he joined us in May of 2016, Ivan has been an integral part of the team, and loves helping our users get the most value out of Rollbar as possible.

ASP.NET MVC is a modern web development framework that combines the features of MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture for better separation of concerns and the best parts of the ASP.NET platform.

We’ll show you an example of how to catch errors and exceptions in ASP.NET MVC using a global action filter. We’ll also show you how to track them in Rollbar’s error monitoring service. This will give you real time visibility into your errors in production. It also captures person data and other context from your app so you can solve errors faster.

Megan Anderson is a software engineer who enjoys helping developers solve technical problems. That's what led her to join Rollbar in May of 2017 as a support engineer, and pushed her into moving into a core engineer role a few months ago.

Cisco Spark is a enterprise collaboration platform from Cisco that includes messaging, video conferencing, desk phones, and digital whiteboards to mention a few.

If your organization uses Cisco Spark, using Rollbar with it has just got easier. Depending on your setup, you can now receive Rollbar alerts not just in your messaging apps but also on that giant screen in the meeting room.