You can write clean code, test obsessively, and deploy with crossed fingers…but errors always find a way. And if you’re not tracking them? You’re gonna get bugged. Whether it’s a silent failure or a full-blown crash, every unreported issue is a hit to your app’s reputation. So, if you’re tired of hearing about problems from your users before your team even catches them, here’s your guide to error tracking tools that actually help you resolve issues before they spiral.
Error tracking is the process of automatically detecting and analyzing errors within your applications, whether occurring in browsers, mobile apps, or backend systems. Instead of relying on user reports or manual testing, many developers utilize error monitoring tools which help to keep an eye on your code in real time. When something goes wrong, these tools can capture critical details, including error messages, stack traces, and the actions that led to the failure. This information is then sent to the error tracking platform dashboard, where developers gain visibility into the issue and can quickly identify the root cause and address the error. To ensure rapid response, many organizations complement their error tracking stack with alert management tools that escalate critical issues to the right on-call personnel in real time based on user-defined policies.
By triggering timely alerts to your alert management tools and providing detailed context, error monitoring tools empower development teams to rapidly identify root causes, accelerate troubleshooting, and implement targeted fixes. In modern software environments, leveraging these tools is vital for sustaining application reliability, minimizing downtime, and maximizing user satisfaction.
Considering that both error tracking and logging enable development teams to monitor application behavior and diagnose issues, they can be easily confused. However, the two serve very distinct purposes, both aimed to work together and ensure your application is running smoothly.
Error tracking is focused on catching and managing errors and anomalies that happen within your application. Error tracking tools can automatically detect code breaks or unexpected behaviors, collect context like stack traces and user actions, and trigger alerts to DevOps teams. The main goal of error tracking is helping development teams identify, prioritize and fix critical issues before they impact more users.
While logging is a broader practice where developers record events, messages, and state information during normal application operations. Logs might include info about user activity, API requests, database queries, or debug messages. Logs allow developers to better understand the flow of the application, troubleshoot issues, and audit behavior, not just when something breaks, but also when things are working or behaving oddly.
Error monitoring tools use a combination of built-in features and developer-defined logic to capture and report issues as they happen. Below are the key methods these solutions rely on to detect errors across different parts of an application, from code-level exceptions to real-time user-side failures:
When creating an application, try/catch blocks are added directly into the code, allowing error tracking tools to immediately catch at runtime, if there is an application failure. This type usually requires developers to go back in and correct the error.
Global error handling enables dev teams to catch unexpected code breaks at the environment level. The error monitoring solution will elevate an issue that would otherwise go unnoticed, unless the user reports the failure. Most of the time, these issues can be fixed automatically without having to touch code.
When a tracking tool provides runtime error monitoring it is tracking live failures and events as users are interacting with your application. These errors are then logged and sent to the development team so that they can analyze the issue. Most error tracking tools will be able to automatically prioritize these issues and let your team know how urgent of an issue it is.
There are some events that may be important to your team specifically, however are not logged by your error tracking system because they do not cause a full crash. So, developers must manually tell the system to notify them when these issues occur. This could be something like failed log ins, payment failures, API timeouts, or warnings.
When evaluating error monitoring tools, it’s important to understand which capabilities hold the most weight. The features below are essential for catching issues early, speeding up resolution, and improving the overall stability of your application:
Error tracking tools should have the ability to alert dev teams in the case of an issue. For more enhanced workflows, most teams integrate their error monitoring with an alerting solution that routes notifications right to the on-call developer’s smartphone.
By implementing an error tracking tool that provides the exact code path that led to the error, developers are empowered to trace the root cause faster and reduce time spent debugging.
Some error tracking systems can group repeated occurrences of an issue to avoid alert fatigue and make triaging easier. This is a crucial feature for eliminating DevOps burnout.
Developers often want to flag non-crashing issues like timeouts or user actions, so investing in a tool that enables teams to create custom events will streamline development workflows.
Top error monitoring tools integrate with popular platforms like GitHub, GitLab, Jira, Slack, and OnPage. These integrations help to streamline workflows by linking errors directly to code changes, notifying the right people, and enabling faster resolution.
Here’s a roundup of the top error tracking tools that help dev teams spot issues fast and keep apps stable:
Source: Sentry.io
Sentry delivers real-time error monitoring with detailed stack traces, event tracking, and user impact insights. It helps teams quickly identify and prioritize critical issues to maintain application stability across any language or framework.
Source: Sentry.io
Sentry offers four pricing options including a free tier for solo developers, Team, built for scalability, priced at $26 per month, Business, for organizations with multiple teams, priced at $80 per month, and Enterprise for large operations with the need for advanced capabilities, which requires teams to contact sales for an estimate.
Source: Rollbar
Rollbar is a real-time error monitoring tool that provides detailed context and root cause analysis to help teams quickly prioritize and resolve issues. It includes automated workflows and insights that support ongoing code quality improvements.
Source: Rollbar
Rollbar offers pricing estimations based on error event volume in addition to the free plan which can be used for teams that have less than 5,000 monthly error events. For example, if your error event volume is 50k/month the Essentials plan is $24.17/month, Advanced is $65.83/month, and Enterprise starts at $25k.
Source: New Relic
New Relic Errors Inbox is an error tracking solution that consolidates errors from your entire application stack into a single dashboard. It enables proactive detection, prioritization, and resolution of errors with detailed context, real-time collaboration, and integrations like OnPage and Slack to help teams fix issues faster and prevent user impact.
Source: New Relic
New Relic pricing is usage based, however, they don’t offer transparent pricing and they require teams to contact their sales team for a more accurate quote.
Source: Honeybadger
Honeybadger is a developer-focused error tracking and monitoring tool that helps detect, diagnose, and resolve application issues before users report them. It offers detailed error reports, real-time alerts, breadcrumbs, and seamless integrations with tools like Github and Jira.
Source: Honeybadger
Honeybadger has three pricing options ranging from their free Developer plan, Team plan for small organizations and teams priced for $26/month and Business plan priced at $80/month.
Source: BugSnag
BugSnag is an error monitoring tool that helps developers detect, prioritize, and resolve application errors across mobile, web, backend platforms. It offers real-time tracking, intelligent grouping, and customizable workflows to streamline debugging and improve app stability.
Source: BugSnag
BugSnag has four pricing tiers including a free version for solo users, the pricing is based off of monthly events, so for 150k monthly events, the Select plan starts at $32/month, the Preferred plan starts at $65/month, and the Enterprise plan requires you to contact sales for an estimate.
Source: Raygun
Raygun is a real-time error monitoring and crash reporting platform that provides full visibility into software issues across your tech stack. With AI-powered root cause analysis, detailed stack traces, and user impact tracking, Raygun helps teams detect, prioritize, and resolve errors.
Source: Raygun
Raygun has four pricing tiers including Basic which is $40/100,000 errors per month, Team at $80/200,000 errors per month, Business at $400/1,000,000 errors per month, and an Enterprise plan with custom pricing.
Source: Airbrake
Airbrake is an error and performance monitoring tool designed for developers, offering real-time alerts, detailed diagnostics, and support for a wide range of programming languages and frameworks. With lightweight, agentless architecture and quick installation, Airbrake helps teams identify, prioritize, and resolve issues faster.
Source: Airbrake
Airbrake has three pricing tiers starting at $19/month for Devs + errors, $38/month for Basics + errors, and $76/month for Pro + errors.
Choosing an error tracking tool isn’t about picking the solution with the most popular name or even the best features, it’s about finding the best fit for your team’s size, tech stack, workflow, and goals. Here’s what teams should consider before investing in an error tracking tool:
One of the most important things to consider before purchasing an error monitoring system is if it supports all of the languages, frameworks, and platforms you use.
You’ll want control over what gets tracked and who is notified during certain issues, so keeping an eye out for tools with custom alerts, bookmarks, and detailed dashboards can make the difference.
Ask yourself, does the tool work well with your team’s existing collaboration tools like OnPage or Microsoft Teams? Integrated workflows help you act fast instead of digging through incidents.
Some tools charge per project, user, or event volume. Make sure the tool you invest in aligns with your current usage and scales affordably with your growth.
Check for active documentation, responsive support, and community presence. These become crucial when you’re troubleshooting unexpected behavior.
Even with the most powerful error monitoring tool, poor implementation and misuse can lead to more confusion than clarity when it comes to incident management. Here are some common pitfalls and how to avoid them:
It’s easy to believe that it is best to track every single event. But tracking too many events leads to excess noise and burnt out dev teams. So, teams should use error grouping, custom events, and filters to stay focused on critical issues.
Alert fatigue is real and an alert without details or actionable info just wastes time. Teams need stack traces, environment data, and breadcrumbs. So, ensure that your error monitoring tool and alerting solution are tightly integrated and contextualized.
It’s easy to get caught up fixing immediate issues, but long-term trends show where your codebase needs deeper improvement. By using timeline views and stability scores teams can catch recurring issues before they escalate.
It’s tempting to dismiss errors that don’t crash the app, but subtle issues like broken UI elements or failed API calls can still hurt the user experience. So, teams should be prioritizing based on user impact, not just severity levels.
If errors don’t get assigned, they don’t get fixed. And if ownership is unclear, things fall through the cracks. Alerting tools like OnPage route critical errors to the assigned engineer through digital scheduling and role-based alert routing.
Integrating your error tracking tool with OnPage ensures that critical software issues trigger real-time alerts that are escalated and acknowledged by DevOps teams without delay. Some of the essential benefits of these integrations include:
Error tracking tools like Sentry or New Relic identify issues in code but detection alone isn’t enough. Without a reliable alerting mechanism, errors can go unnoticed, especially outside of business hours. OnPage converts high-priority error events into urgent, actionable alerts that guarantee engineers are mobilized.
OnPage provides escalation policies, alert redundancy, and failover protocols, ensuring alerts don’t sit buried in email inboxes or Slack channels. If the primary responder doesn’t acknowledge the alert, it automatically routes to the engineer in the escalation. This is essential for uptime-critical apps where error resolution time directly affects user experience and revenue.
When integrated, every error alert pushed from tools like BugSnag or Airbrake into OnPage is tracked with a full audit trail including who the message was sent to, when it was sent, delivered, and read, and what actions were taken. This enables better postmortems and incident review processes by tying error detection to the incident response process.
Integrating error tracking and alerting helps optimize mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) and mean time to resolution (MTTR) by reducing human latency. Instead of relying on DevOps engineers to manually check dashboard and email inboxes, OnPage ensures high-severity errors trigger mobile alerts with persistent notification mechanisms like loud ringtones, repeated delivery, and escalation policies.
In fast-paced CI/CD environments, releases happen more often. Errors introduced by new deployment can surface instantly through error monitoring tools. By integrating those with OnPage, deployment-related regressions trigger alerts in real time, helping dev teams roll back or patch faster, and reduce customer impact.
Error tracking tools have become essential for maintaining application stability and delivering a seamless user experience. By automatically identifying, grouping, and prioritizing issues, they help teams resolve problems faster and reduce downtime. But tracking alone isn’t enough. Integrating with an alerting platform like OnPage ensures that critical errors are not just logged but acknowledged and acted on by the right engineers, immediately. Whether you’re managing a small team or supporting enterprise-scale systems, combining tracking with timely response closes the loop between detection and resolution. As software ecosystems continue to grow more complex, this kind of end-to-end visibility and accountability is no longer optional. It is the new baseline.
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