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Error monitoring is vital in software development and maintenance. It's the powerhouse behind your team's ability to track, manage, and dissect the nitty-gritty of application errors. The best tools in this arena do more than just point out blunders; they help you understand why mistakes happen, paving the way for quick and effective solutions.
This capability is crucial for keeping your applications healthy, enhancing user experiences, and bolstering system reliability. In our fast-paced tech world, where even a little downtime can mean significant revenue loss, robust error monitoring tools are not just excellent to have—they're essential.
Error monitoring tools are game-changers for engineering teams, equipping them with several key features to boost efficiency and performance:
Modern error monitoring solutions come packed with extensive SDKs compatible with various programming languages. This means no matter what tech stack your team uses, these tools integrate seamlessly into your development process, easily capturing and analyzing errors across various environments.
These tools are like detectives, offering full trace capabilities for exceptions. They let engineers see when and where an error occurred and what was happening just before the error. This depth of detail is a goldmine for debugging and slashes the time needed to pinpoint and resolve issues.
Many error monitoring tools boast robust integrations with project management and alerting systems like JIRA and PagerDuty. This setup automates the journey from detecting an error to resolving it, ensuring that teams respond swiftly and efficiently to issues as they occur.
Some of the more sophisticated tools in this field harness AI to suggest error fixes. This can be a huge help, especially for less experienced developers, guiding them through the troubleshooting process and aiding more seasoned developers in crafting creative solutions more efficiently.
When it comes to picking error monitoring tools, there are a few critical features you should focus on to ensure your team can effectively detect, diagnose, and resolve issues:
Focusing on these essential features can help you choose a tool that fits your current requirements and grows with your development needs. This will ensure your applications run smoothly and continue to meet user expectations effectively.
In this section, we will cover some of the popular tools for error monitoring and they are listed below:
Sentry
BugSnag
Honeybadger
New Relic
Datadog
Raygun Crash Reporting
Rollbar
LogRocket
Better Stack (formerly Better Uptime)
GlitchTip
Sentry is a vital tool for software teams to monitor the health of their application code. It offers everything from error tracking to performance monitoring, helping developers gain clarity, resolve issues faster, and continuously improve their applications across both the frontend and backend. Sentry provides code-level observability for top companies like Disney, Peloton, Cloudflare, Eventbrite, Slack, Supercell, and Rockstar Games.
Company overview: Sentry provides open-source and hosted error monitoring to help software teams discover, triage, and prioritize errors in real time.
Benefits (pros):
G2 Ratings: 4.5
https://www.g2.com/products/sentry/reviews
Sentry offers a free plan, and paid plans start at $26 per month. These plans provide additional features like unlimited events and enhanced support.
BugSnag tracks app errors and provides actionable insights to enhance stability, helping you decide between building features or fixing bugs. It offers real-time visibility, segmentation, and prioritized alerts to focus on critical issues. With over 30 integrations, BugSnag's full-stack monitoring integrates seamlessly with your preferred tools, enabling fast bug investigation and routing to minimize impact on user experience.
Company overview: Bugsnag automates the process of monitoring applications for bugs and exceptions, providing stability management to improve application health.
Benefits (pros):
G2 Rating: 4.3
https://www.g2.com/products/bugsnag/reviews
BugSnag offers a free plan for solo users, with paid plans starting at $20 per month, providing error and performance monitoring features, unlimited users, and customizable events and spans.
Honeybadger offers exception and uptime monitoring to ensure web applications run smoothly and remain free of errors.
Company overview: Honeybadger offers a blend of error, uptime, and check-in monitoring designed to inform teams about the health of their sites and services.
Benefits (pros):
G2 Ratings: 4.5
https://www.g2.com/products/honeybadger/reviews
Honeybadger offers a free plan for solo developers, with paid plans starting at $39 per month, which include unlimited users, error tracking, uptime monitoring, and logs.
New Relic pioneered cloud APM for application engineers and is now a leader in observability. It serves as a trusted source of data-driven decision-making for engineers throughout the software stack and lifecycle. With around 25 million engineers worldwide spanning over 25 roles, New Relic empowers them to gain real-time insights and track performance trends, helping businesses become more resilient and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Company overview: New Relic offers an observability platform that helps engineers create more perfect software.
Benefits (pros):
G2 Ratings: 4.3
https://www.g2.com/products/new-relic/reviews
New Relic offers flexible pricing plans, including a free tier and pay-as-you-go options, allowing users to scale according to their monitoring and observability needs.
Datadog is a monitoring, security, and analytics platform designed for developers, IT operations teams, security engineers, and business users in the cloud era. This SaaS platform seamlessly integrates and automates infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, and log management, delivering unified, real-time visibility into its customers' entire technology stack. Organizations of all sizes and across various industries utilize Datadog to facilitate digital transformation and cloud migration, foster collaboration among development, operations, security, and business teams, expedite application time to market, decrease problem resolution time, secure applications and infrastructure, analyze user behavior, and monitor essential business metrics.
Company overview: Datadog is a monitoring service for cloud-scale applications. It offers a data analytics platform across servers, databases, tools, and services.
Benefits (pros):
G2 Rating: 4.3
https://www.g2.com/products/datadog/reviews/datadog-review-9831783
Datadog offers a variety of pricing plans, starting at $15/month, designed to accommodate the needs of different teams and organizations and ensure comprehensive monitoring and analytics solutions.
Raygun provides real-time visibility into your software's health, enabling you to proactively detect and fix issues before they affect customers. Its suite of digital experience monitoring tools offers actionable, customer-focused insights across your entire tech stack. This helps improve software quality and performance, ensuring fast, error-free experiences that enhance customer satisfaction and support business growth.
Company overview: Raygun provides a comprehensive error monitoring solution that offers real-time crash reporting across all platforms and languages.
Benefits (pros):
G2 Ratings: 4.3 stars
https://www.g2.com/products/raygun/reviews
Raygun offers a pricing model based on usage. Each plan has a free 14-day trial. Paid plans begin at $40/100,000/month.
Go beyond crash reporting and error monitoring with Rollbar’s instant, accurate alerts and real-time error feeds, including unhandled exceptions. Its machine learning-powered grouping reduces noise and provides trusted error signals, helping teams resolve issues efficiently.
Company overview: Rollbar specializes in continuous code improvement and real-time error monitoring, helping developers fix bugs before users notice them.
Benefits (pros):
G2 Ratings: 4.5
https://www.g2.com/products/rollbar/reviews
Rollbar offers a free plan with basic features, and paid plans start at $15.83 per month, scaling based on event volume and advanced features.
LogRocket integrates session replay, product analytics, and error tracking, enabling software teams to deliver an optimized product experience.
Company overview: LogRocket combines session replay, performance monitoring, and product analytics to help teams build better web applications faster.
Benefits (pros):
G2 Ratings: 4.6
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https://www.g2.com/products/logrocket/reviews
LogRocket offers a free plan with basic features, while paid plans start at $69 per month, scaling based on usage and additional features.
Better Stack enables you to monitor and troubleshoot any part of your stack, visualizing it in real-time. It aggregates logs into structured data, allowing you to query them using SQL like a database. You can monitor everything from websites to servers, set up on-call rotations, and receive actionable alerts to resolve incidents quickly. With over 100 integrations, it's designed to fit seamlessly into your workflow.
Company overview: Better Stack provides a comprehensive monitoring solution, combining error tracking with uptime monitoring and incident management.
Benefits (pros):
G2 Rating: 4.8
https://www.g2.com/products/better-stack/reviews
Better Stack offers a free plan with basic features, and paid plans start at $29 per month, scaling based on usage and additional capabilities.
GlitchTip simplifies software monitoring by offering error tracking, performance monitoring, and uptime checks in one platform. It is compatible with Sentry client SDKs but easier to run. As an open-source solution, users can view, modify, and use the code on their own servers or opt for hosted services.
Company overview: GlitchTip offers open-source error monitoring, aiming to provide an accessible and straightforward solution for developers.
Benefits (pros):
GlitchTip offers a free plan, with paid plans starting at $15 per month, scaling based on error volume and additional features.
Choosing the right error monitoring tool is crucial for maintaining the health and performance of your applications. Each tool listed offers unique features that cater to different needs, from real-time error tracking and AI-powered resolution recommendations to extensive integration capabilities.
Evaluate these tools based on specific needs such as language support, trace detail, integration requirements, and AI features to select a solution that fits your current requirements and scales with your development needs. Investing in a robust error monitoring tool is a proactive step towards ensuring your applications run smoothly and continue to meet user expectations effectively.
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