While attending the JavaScript conference FluentConf last week in San Francisco, I heard a few people talking about a tool called Errorception. They said it offered an easy way to track all the client-side errors your users are experiencing. Since I’m a fan of an error-free website, I decided to give it a try.
Signup was super simple – you don’t need a credit card to try it out and you can be up and running within minutes. I’ve only been using it for about a week so far, but here’s my list of pros and cons:
PROS
- Reasonably priced. Their cheap plan is $5/month. Their 30 day free trial allows you to test it out without committing to anything.
- Extremely high performance. After installing the code I profiled the load time of the script and it was about 5ms. I don’t think I’ve ever put anything on my pages that loads that quickly, not even static css on my own server.
- Great interface. It groups duplicate errors to avoid muddying the reports. Everything is consolidated in an easy to read fashion and you can even get periodic emails letting you know of new errors.
- Real-time. Errors started pouring in within minutes. I reached my daily cap (for my trial account) within about an hour.
- It’s run by entrepreneur/developer Rakesh Pai. I emailed Rakesh a few questions and he went above and beyond helping me out. Rakesh is an extremely intelligent and thoughtful human being who wants everyone to succeed. He claims he’s no rock star, but what he’s been able to accomplish puts him in the class of Jimi Hendrix.
CONS
- I’m having a hard time trying to replicate some of the errors. It provides you with the user’s browser and user agent and line number of the offending script, but that doesn’t seem to be enough. IE line numbers are reportedly innaccurate, and with so much JS minimized it’s hard to really trace the problem. Stack traces are not available. The website explains the reasoning for this and I agree with the choices that were made, so I’m not sure what to suggest. Since the goal of using this service is to eliminate errors I’m not sure how successful I’ll be if I can’t replicate them first.
SUMMARY
Great service run by great talent. The only shortcoming is perhaps a domain-problem that can’t be solved or a shortfall of my own programming intellect. I’d highly recommend anyone give it a shot by at least trying it out now.
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