I wrote a brief review for Airbrake.io on Capterra and I wanted to share my experiences in more detail over here on the cb blog. I set up the service on 3 different apps, and each app had its own story to tell. In this post I’ll tell you about those 3 apps, and what we were able to find and fix thanks to Airbrake.io.
WordPress: CodingBlocks.Net
Airbrake.io hooked us up with a promotional account and we were able to quickly get it installed and configured for codingblocks.net. At the time we were experiencing transient outages and we were frustrated with the generic error messages.
After the setup, it wasn’t long before we noticed an interesting pattern in the timing and narrowed the problem down to one of our plugins. Surprise, it was a caching problem! We’ve since rectified the issue and things have been running great ever since.
ASP.NET MVC: ColorMine.Org
I set Airbrake.io up on ColorMine.org. It’s a (woefully neglected) color difference calculator written in ASP.NET MVC. Installation was a breeze, but I couldn’t believe how many problems there were! It quickly became evident that somebody was directly calling the web services that I had setup for the site. This wouldn’t have been so bad, except that they would often pass invalid arguments that were throwing cpu intensive exceptions.
I knew that there were problems with the site but I had been overwhelmed with information. Thanks to Airbrake.io I went from noisy, pointless, and ultimately ignored exception emails to getting just a few clean and concise notifications!
Look at all those errors!
JavaScript: Chess Squad
After that experience I made a quick “whirlwind tour” of Airbrake.io on YouTube. I had told a few people about the service but I wanted something that I could link to so they could see how it all worked. In the video, I set up Airbrake.io on a JavaScript chess app that had been giving me grief. I was able to set the service up in under a minute, including additional information about the chess moves that had been made in the game up until the point when the error occurred. The custom data let me quickly see and compare what moves had been made in the game, and I was quickly able to figure out a workaround to the problem.
Check out the video below:
Summary
So, to wrap it all up. We had 3 great experiences with Airbrake.io on 3 very different platforms and each step of the way was easy.
Check out the free trial to what stories await you!
