Jonathan Peppers is the Senior Developer in the app department at Hitcents, working on cross-platform C# applications. He is a Xamarin MVP and author of the book, Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development. Hitcents is the software company behind the Hanx writer, with about 60 people in Bowling Green, KY. There are two sides to the company: building custom software for clients such as line of business apps, and building in-house apps and games.

“Raygun is a “real” error tracking system, compared to what we have developed ourselves for apps in the past,” Jonathan explains. “There’s an SDK for nearly any platform you’re developing for, which reports errors to the Raygun backend service. You can choose to receive emails when errors occur, and Raygun provides plenty of reports and filtering on the web dashboard to help figure out what went wrong.”

“Before we started using Raygun, I felt like we had no visibility into some of the errors that were actually happening in production. In customer facing apps, we have seen the number of errors we’ve fixed from Raygun reports affect monetization in a positive way. With apps we’ve built for clients, many times we can proactively react to an error from a Raygun email during Beta testing. Clients are generally impressed, because we have a head start on fixing it before they have time to report it to us.”

“If you have an application that has a significant number of users, or really want to provide an excellent error tracking service to your clients, Raygun is a no-brainer. We feel like the monthly cause easily pays for itself by improving your app’s monetization or keeping your paying clients happy.”

“So far, having a reliable SDK that is reporting errors on multiple platforms has been the best feature. We have apps on iOS, Android, web apps in Ruby on Rails on Linux, and ASP.Net on Azure. Getting reliable error reporting on all these platforms and being able to aggregate them under one application in Raygun gives us a better view of the whole picture.”

“My team generally complains about using new things as they are learning (such as new source control). They have never complained about Raygun, so it must be a great service. Generally, everyone wants an email when something goes wrong in their code, and Raygun’s SDKs are easy to setup in your app.”