Error Monitoring Software - What’s Best for Your Company?

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First impressions count. And, that’s why you want to aim for an error-free experience every time your users open up your software. Front-end software errors or bugs, however, are unavoidable – it’s the nature of technology. That’s why your team’s process to quickly catch and fix them is so important.

Front-end error monitoring should be a separate and continuous process to your operational error monitoring. Why?

You don’t want to overload your Ops engineer who’s already busy working on your backend

Unnoticed front-end bugs directly affect your customers

That’s why investing time into a front-end error monitoring process is essential for the modern SaaS company. Implementing error monitoring infrastructure into your team’s daily workflow is a great way to automate this process. An AI-powered tool like Bugpilot, for example, is cost-effective and designed to integrate with other common SaaS tools, making it a seamless process fit.

Let’s take a deeper dive into why error monitoring software is important and what market options are out there for your business!

What is an Error Monitoring Software?

Error monitoring software is a system that tracks bugs within your product. They alert and assist your team to stay on top of bug fixes before the errors can become more complex issues.

Front-end or user-facing error monitoring specifically monitors your software from the perspective of your users. It detects potential and real issues that could occur while your software is in deployment.

Some common user-facing bugs include:

Website errors (JavaScript, server, browser, etc.)

Failed network requests

Software performance issues like application latency or poor API calls

Failed HTTP requests

Uses experience (UX) problems

Error monitoring software should:

Track the error’s tail (what occurred in the lead up to the error)

Give you backend visibility as to what went wrong in the coding

Provide potential root causes and troubleshooting steps to start bug fixing

How Can Error Monitoring Software Benefit You?

It Increases Developer Productivity

Competition is fierce and developers are under constant pressure to create new features, integrations and maintain updated applications. By offering them a safety net with an effective error monitoring system, your developers will feel more confident rolling out these products more quickly.

It Helps Enhanced Customer Experience

Your users are your most important asset. So, it stands to reason you want to create the best experience for your customers. Error monitoring makes sure that you either:

Find and fix an issue before it occurs

Find and fix an issue almost immediately after it occurs

This proactive approach to error monitoring and bug fixing shows your customers that you care about their user experience.

Can Reduce Costs and Increase Revenue

By catching errors quickly, you avoid the possibility of bugs progressing to a critical point or a crash altogether.

This means your front end provides a good user experience, increasing user retention, which means you’ll be spending less in terms of customer acquisition.. And, your developers only spend a fraction of their time bug-fixing minor errors, reducing unnecessary labor costs.

Things to Consider When Looking for Error Monitoring Software

Use Case

Your business’ “use case” is a breakdown of exactly why you need an error monitoring tool. Some questions to ask include:

What’s your exact purpose for implementing error monitoring software? What are you trying to achieve?

What are the main types of errors your software needs to catch?

Knowing the answers to these questions will help you narrow down which software meets your practical needs best.

Language Support and Frameworks

Consider your current application framework and coding languages. Are they adequately supporting your business? Will they continue to do so in the future as you continue to grow?

Choosing an error monitoring tool should be a long-term investment. That means you want to choose software that supports both your current and future business model.

Budget

Like all software, error monitoring tools can vary dramatically in pricing structures. Take an honest look at your budget before you commit to any software. Some questions you can ask yourself, include:

Do I want a fixed-pricing or on-demand pricing structure?

Do I want to pay per server or one blanket price?

What’s my cost versus benefit analysis communicating?

Best Error Monitoring Software to Use

#1: Bugpilot

Designed for SaaS businesses, Bugpilot is a cost-effective, straightforward error monitoring software. By automating the most expensive parts of the bug resolution process, Bugpilot saves your team hours of work and subsequent labor costs.

Bugpilot’s Bug Inbox is where you’ll all problematic user experiences that need your attention.

Bugpilot focuses on user-facing bugs and provides comprehensive bug reports to assist your team in:

Monitoring and logging bugs

Understanding what the bugs are and their potential root causes

Prioritizing which bugs require immediate attention

Releasing fixes (including coding solutions), and troubleshooting steps

Bugpilot is designed to fit seamlessly into your team’s current workflow by having integrations with some of the most common SaaS tools, including:

Zendesk

Jira

Trello

Notion

Sentry

With three monthly subscription options and a 14-day free trial to get you started, Bugpilot is a great, customizable option for SaaS businesses.

#2: Rollbar

A “code improvement platform,” Rollbar is an AI-assisted workflow tool that discovers, predicts, and helps developers bug-fix errors in real time.

Offering an automated error-response feature, Rollbar helps your developers stay focused on new innovations, by spending less time on tedious bug fixes.

Rollbar includes features such as:

A real-time feed of errors

Metadata reports of each bug to help you prioritize bug fixes

Code-context reports for each bug to help you fix problem code quickly

Rollbar offers monthly subscription plans based on your company’s average volume of error events. To get you started, they also offer a free Rollbar account!

#3: Bugsnag

Adopting a more blanket approach, Bugsnag is an error monitoring software that focuses on application stability. By pre-setting stability targets, Bugsnag can monitor for errors that will be a direct threat to these specific targets.

This type of error monitoring software aims to give your developers clarity on which bugs are worth attention and which can be left alone. Depending on your user or session’s stability score, your developers can make the call to either de-bug or continue software development.

Bugsnag offers users a free trial before committing to a monthly subscription. Alternatively, you can contact Bugsnag to discuss customizable enterprise plans.

#4: TrackJS

TrackJS is an error-monitoring system that detects common user-facing bugs such as:

Incorrect code

Incompatible browsers

Infrastructure outages (crashes)

Third-party changes

TrackJS finds these errors in real time, recording detailed metadata to create a contextual breakdown of the bug for your developers. In partnership with RemoteJS, developers can then perform the debugging process using their Remote JavaScript Debugger tool.

TrackJS runs a monthly subscription model. Prices vary according to:

The number of page views per month

Number of covered applications

Number of errors per month

#5: Airbrake

A cloud-based error reporting solution, Airbrake is built to support development teams in small-medium sized organizations. Alongside error monitoring, it also offers performance monitoring and deploy tracking.

Airbrake provides contextual data to better understand how many users have experienced an error, helping your team prioritize debugging efforts. They also provide Stack Trace - a broken code identifying tool so you can identify, find and fix problem code efficiently.

Available for all major programming languages and frameworks, Airbrake has both monthly and yearly subscription options covering 1-unlimited users, teams and projects.

#6: LogRocket

Built for Javascript applications, LogRocket is a technical and UX error monitoring software. LogRocket’s most identifiable feature is its session replay tool. This feature provides developers with a video replay of product issues across both mobile and the web.

Alongside network logs and rich meta-data, LogRocket’s error reports provide a strong base to perform in-depth bug fixes.

Their monthly subscription model ranges from a free account to a customizable enterprise plan. Both their ‘Team’ and ‘Professional’ subscription packages offer a 14-day free trial.

#7: AppSignal

An Application Performance Management tool, AppSignal provides 6 monitoring features for programming languages Ruby, Rails, Elixir and Phoenix. Designed to integrate with your team’s chosen communication tool, your developers can receive alerts as soon as an error is detected.

Other features include:

Performance monitoring

Host monitoring

Uptime monitoring

Metrics dashboard

Anomaly detection

AppSignal provides new users a 30-day free trial with no limitations on hosts, teams, integrations, and apps. After your free trial, your monthly subscription price depends on your chosen number of monthly requests.

#8: Sentry

For both front and backend error monitoring, Sentry is a developer-first application that provides code-level observability to its clients. By identifying and tracking errors like broken code, system crashes and busted API calls, Sentry helps developers solve bugs faster and improve their code.

Monthly subscriptions range from free through to enterprise level, with free trials available for both ‘team’ and ‘business’ level subscriptions.

Ready to Invest in Error Monitoring Software?

The benefits of investing in a user-facing error monitoring tool far outweigh any costs. Your user experience quality stays high; your developers feel confident in rolling out new features and staying ahead of the curve, and you minimize the possibility of critical errors crashing your product.

Investing in an automated AI tool like Bugpilot is a partially cost effective and efficient way to reap these benefits. With a monthly pricing structure that’s tailorable to your company’s current needs, the control remains in your hands. Find out more about Bugpilot’s subscription options and start reaping the benefits today.