Crash rate is a key metric to manage for your mobile apps as your development teams move faster to release features. High crash rates caused by errors and bugs can tank your app listing in the app store, reduce engagement, and increase user churn – all of which are bad for business. Errors are inevitable and while you can’t eradicate 100% of them in development, you can definitely mitigate them before they degrade the user experience and your app rating.
It's critical for companies to deploy robust error reporting processes that help proactively mitigate application crash rates by identifying issues earlier, to ensure a quality mobile experience.
In this error reporting overview, we'll break down how error reports work, what advantages they offer, and how this process works in Sauce Labs Error Reporting.
What Is Error Reporting?
Error reporting is the process of monitoring, identifying, and reporting errors in mobile applications, web services, and other software solutions. While the top-level function of error reporting is to pinpoint key issues, the ultimate goal is to discover the underlying cause of errors, in turn making it possible for IT teams to permanently correct the issue for all users.
Although error reporting has always been a key component of releasing reliable applications, the maturity of CI/CD and DevOps teams means innovation velocity has reached a pace where error reporting tools must keep pace with faster release cycles.
In addition, the increasing expectation of end-users for cloud and mobile-native apps that support always-on connections and real-time interaction means that companies can't afford to wait when it comes to eliminating errors. The sheer scope and size of application environments create a situation where critical issues are difficult to find, which then rapidly become big problems impacting the user experience.
Benefits of Effective Error Reporting
Some of the top benefits of error reporting include:
Reducing customer churn: If customers encounter application-breaking crashes or issues that prevent them from quickly completing key functions, they'll churn to other options. Pinpointing problems ASAP helps companies reduce customer churn rates.
Reducing Mean Time To Recover (MTTR): Faster detection of issues, with detailed information about the problem, and facilitating quicker diagnosis allows engineering teams to address problems more efficiently and minimize downtime; essentially, the more comprehensive and timely the error reports, the less time is spent trying to identify the root cause of an issue, leading to a faster resolution
Improved engineering efficiency: With the right error reporting solution that automatically collects, dedupes, and groups errors, engineers can prioritize and fix critical issues faster so they can return to coding and releasing features.
Capturing critical events: Comprehensive error reporting helps your team separate one-off events from more widespread and problematic issues. Complete capture of these issues allows teams to investigate them fullu and find a fix.
Creating reliable analysis: Analyzing error reporting data allows you to discover trends that are impacting your operations over time. Regular and reliable analysis empowers teams to understand how errors impact your application at scale.
Increasing development speed: The rise of DevOps teams speaks to the need for speed. Employees and end-users want access to new applications and updates as quickly as possible, and teams want built-in processes that empower this effort without compromising security. Continuous error reporting gives DevOps teams the data they need to make adjustments during development, rather than after the fact.
Identifying root causes: The biggest benefit of error reporting is identifying root causes. While solving for symptoms can temporarily pause problems, it won't address underlying issues, creating circular concerns. Root cause identification gives teams the tools they need to solve problems permanently.
Sauce Error Reporting
Sauce Error Reporting is an application crash and error reporting platform that empowers engineering teams to mitigate high crash rates by capturing, prioritizing, and resolving critical issues. It's designed to automate the process of cross-platform crash and exception management so teams can spend less time fixing bugs and focus on building great features.
As a component of Sauce Labs Platform for Test, it's possible for development teams to quickly scale up their testing and error monitoring frameworks to address problems of any scope or size.
Key Features
To help give enterprises an unfair advantage in error monitoring, Sauce Error Reporting includes key features such as:
Cross-platform crash data capture: No matter where your applications are designed and run, Sauce Error Reporting has you covered. Supported platforms for error data capture include C/C++, Electron, C#, Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, UE4, Unity, Xbox, Minidump, Coredump, Visual Studio, and more.
Complete data access means you have full and accurate information to reproduce the errors and get to the root cause faster.
Query and search: Sauce Error Reporting lets teams search across a wide range of attributes and issue types to prioritize error responses.
Powerful deduping and grouping lets you easily find the low-frequency but critical errors that may be hiding behind higher-frequency, non-critical errors that can be fixed later.
Session Replay lets you view the user's activity when interacting with the application. The full context allows for a better understanding of what actions caused the error.
Source code integration lets you go directly to the section of code triggering the issue. Additionally, your source code remains secure since it is not stored in Sauce Error Reporting.
Customizable attributes: Customize your prioritization processes based on the number of hosts or clients impacted, specific runtime data, or create your own attributes to resolve key issues.
Debug on mobile and web: Sauce Error Reporting offers the benefit of debugging on either the web or mobile, letting you identify and resolve issues faster than ever.
Workflow integration: Sauce Error Reporting works with the tools you already use for alerting, ticket tracking, and messaging systems to help deliver seamless error management.
Retention management: Both metadata and error dump files can be managed on their own schedules, which makes long-term trend analysis possible.
Data scrubbing: To help ensure compliance, Sauce Error Reporting provides data scrubbing of personally identifiable information to remove sensitive data from dump files across execution paths, memory, environmental variables, and register values.
Critical Processes
For Sauce Error Reporting to deliver unparalleled error reporting performance, three processes are critical:
Agility: Using a cross-platform call stack and event aggregation monitoring allows you to process errors from anywhere in your system at any time to deliver unparalleled agility.
Automation: Automated analysis of error data means you’ll be able to get to the root cause faster, in turn improving your time to resolution objectives.
Analysis: Get the answer to questions that matter with a rich query and analysis engine that provides high-level views of error frequency, prioritization, and trends across your entire stack.
Solving for Problems at Scale
Ready to significantly reduce high crash rates and ensure users have a great mobile experience? Start with Sauce Error Reporting, then scale and sauce it up with the Sauce Labs Platform for Test. For more information, let's talk.
