Feature release: Real User Monitoring session inside Raygun Crash Reporting

Many thanks to our customers for suggesting Raygun’s latest feature: a Real User Monitoring session inside Raygun Crash Reporting.

Raygun Crash Reporting and Real User Monitoring are stand alone tools, however when used together they are powerful in providing greater context around an error.

If you use Raygun Crash Reporting, you will know that it provides the deep diagnostic details (like the stacktrace) that you need to find an error in order to fix it. However, you may find yourself in a situation where the data is in an unexpected state and is a little tougher to diagnose. Your code may have passed every unit test, yet end users are still experiencing the error.

These edge cases are usually caused by an unforeseen sequence of events, for example the way the end user is travelling through your app combined with the browser they are using. This in turn makes it difficult to replicate the environment in which an error occurred making the debugging process a lot longer.

This is where the new Real User Monitoring session feature helps. When Raygun Crash Reporting receives an error, our new ‘Session’ tab will let you know the exact path the end user took to encounter the particular error, so you can find and fix it quickly.

Where you can find the data you need:

If you have both Raygun Crash Reporting and Real User Monitoring, you will notice a new tab named ‘Session’ inside your Raygun Crash Reporting dashboard:  

On the top left side of your screen, you will see the ‘User information’ and the ‘Device information’ which is pulled directly from your Real User Monitoring software.

Below this information you will also see a deeper dive into the user experience data, showing session length and page health score. As you can see in this example, this end user has been affected by one error:

Using the timeline feature shown below, you can see a detailed breakdown of how the end user arrived at the error. This is a compressed view centered around the exception that has occurred.

To expose the full stack trace, simply click the ‘View Session’ button above the session trace:

For finding edge cases, the timeline feature is particularly important. In a usual QA process, discovering how an end user arrived at an error is difficult, as not everyone accurately remembers which actions they took prior to the encountering an error. The timeline feature gives an accurate representation of the true path an end user took so you can replicate the error with confidence and fix it much faster.

Do you have any questions about the new ‘Session’ tab inside Raygun Crash Reporting? Get in touch with a team member and we will be happy to help.