Application error handling with Honeybadger

Part two in a series of posts detailing the services we use at work. This post covers how we handle errors in our application. Part one covered continuous integration.

Errors?

Error handling is very important for any application; you want to know when things break right? Traditionally applications have used log files or emails, however, monitoring a log file is cumbersome and suddenly getting thousands of emails is overwhelming.

There are plenty of services that make error handling easier; Honeybadger, Airbrake, Sentry, Raygun, the list goes on... They all essentially do the same thing just with the odd unique selling point or price difference. These services provide a central place for errors, smartly notify you when they occur, combine duplicates, allow team members to comment, and integrate with third-party bug tracking and notification systems - all terribly important things.

At Stinkyink we went with Honeybadger and get by with the micro plan which is $19/pm for 3 apps and 7 days retention. A nice feature of Honeybadger is that it knows about Rails' stack trace and it attempts to tidy it for you. When you dig into the exception you also get useful information like environment variables, session data, cookie data and the query params.

Honeybadger is very Ruby focused so if you need other language support then Sentry is often recommended. I think their base plan is $24/pm (if you need teams, or $9/pm if you don't). If you're looking to spend very little then errbit looks good - it's a self hosted open source project. Regardless of which one you choose the important thing is you pick one.

Honeybadger setup for Rails

Setting up Honeybadger is dead simple for Rails.

Add the following to your Gemfile.

gem 'honeybadger'

Then generate the initializer with the following command.

rails generate honeybadger --api-key your-api-key

That should be all you need to do. Honeybadger will now send any exceptions that happen within Rails to your account, and it should have sent a test when you ran the generate command.

Honeybadger allows you to manually send exceptions to your account. This is especially useful if you want to pass additional information along with the error.

Here is an example from their documentation.

begin
  params = {
    :id => 1,
    :class => MyClass,
    :foo => "bar"
  }
  my_unpredicable_method(*params)
rescue => e
  Honeybadger.notify(
    :error_class   => "Special Error",
    :error_message => "Special Error: #{e.message}",
    :parameters    => params
  )
end

Getting notifications

Honeybadger will notify you via email by default, but who reads email? Like with our continuous integration we like to send our notifications to HipChat. This can be setup in the project's settings.

Conclusion

We have been using Honeybadger for over a year now and having a service handle our error reporting has been incredibly useful. The HipChat integration provides enough of a nag factor that developers are reminded of issues without being overwhelmed so much as to ignore them entirely. I highly recommend going down this route with your applications right from day one. The costs are small enough to be a no-brainer for any business.