Call In The Experts: 5 Reasons To NOT Roll Your Own Error Monitoring Solution
One of the most surprising things I find when speaking with prospective customers is how many of them have rolled their own home-grown error monitoring solution; over the past ten years I've seen dozens of cobbled together, poorly maintained bug dashboards. In the past, building your own error monitoring solution may have made sense, after all this is a relatively nascent industry, but there are now multiple world class off-the-shelf error monitoring solutions available (including Bugsnag). There's no longer any excuse to roll your own.
(New to error monitoring? Here are the five most important reasons to use an error monitoring solution. If you’re already convinced that error monitoring is essential to the development process, keep reading.)
Some of you might be seriously considering building your own homegrown error monitoring system, despite the available third-party tools. While an honorable endeavor, there are five good reasons why a third-party error monitoring system is a much stronger bet if you want to safeguard your applications and keep developers and customers happy.
1. Focus on Core Competency, Eliminate Risk, and Plan for the Future
Product and engineering teams are driven to focus on building new applications and features, not a system for tracking down errors. It’s a huge responsibility to provide reliable error monitoring, and mishandling it opens your organization up to risk. For example, leading mobile gaming company Zynga recognized that their engineers are experts at building mobile games. Rather than sidetrack engineers with building a homegrown tool, they selected a professional error monitoring solution whose core competency is error monitoring and reporting.
A professional error monitoring solution supports full stack monitoring, all the way from the backend infrastructure to the end user. With a DIY tool, you’re locked into a position where you can only monitor the platforms that the homegrown tool supports.
Professional error monitoring enables you to never worry about internal infrastructure changes, and you can use an error monitoring solution for multiple languages and frameworks. When you want to further visualize and analyze errors, error monitoring solutions have built-in integrations with other tools for BI and data management.
Additionally, such a tool includes multiple deployment options, such as SaaS and on-premise, to match any security or compliance requirements.
2. Save Time and Money
On average, companies lose $1,500 per engineer per month on debugging
On average, companies lose $1,500 per engineer per month on debugging, and 60% of an engineer’s time is spent investigating and fixing bugs. The last thing you want to do is add those losses to the hours your engineers will spend building and maintaining homegrown tools. With a professional tool, engineers find, prioritize, and fix with speed. In fact, developer productivity increases 40% with error monitoring solutions, which provide the exact location and source of every error.
As companies scale, error monitoring needs grow larger and more complex. Not surprisingly, engineering organizations often need more functionality and customizability from their error monitoring tool. You want to be able to focus on building the core product rather than scaling a homegrown tool and shouldering its infrastructure costs. That money is better spent getting a professional error monitoring tool from the get-go.
3. Swap Employee Turnover for Employee Happiness
You know that previous point about saving time and money? It’s equally important to save your engineers’ time. While it might seem like a no-brainer, it’s worth restating: Engineers would much rather spend time working on the core product instead of investigating software bugs and building homegrown error monitoring tools.
Error monitoring is worth its weight in gold because of the stronger developer experiences it provides
Burnout is a real challenge in the tech industry, with over 57% of tech workers stating that they suffer from job burnout. Engineers tend to reach this point when priorities shift away from working on new projects and land instead on bug fixing. They also become disengaged when they are forced to use a homegrown tool that works poorly and doesn’t meet their needs. With such high demand for top engineering talent, directors and c-level leaders are realizing that professional error monitoring is worth its weight in gold because of the stronger developer experiences it provides, which boosts productivity. Plus, when you eliminate the burden of technical debt from engineers, you provide them with mental clarity and creativity to build better software. Win-win!
4. Choose Innovation and Expertise
Professional error monitoring tools are built and maintained by teams that have freedom and opportunity to continuously innovate, and can learn from the feedback from the engineering teams at world-class companies. One example is the introduction of release stability scores in the error monitoring process. Calculated with real-time error rates and session data, stability scores reflect the percentage of successful user interactions per release. They tell the real story about the impact of errors and technical debt and provide a single metric that speaks directly to the overall application health.
Professional tools deliver a premium debugging experience and include functionality such as:
- Handled and unhandled errors in production: Crash reporting SDKs automatically report errors from your production application. You gain immediate insight into how many users are affected by a bug, as well as how to fix it with diagnostic information.
- Breadcrumbs, stack traces, and environment states: If your engineering organization wants to diagnose errors faster, you must have all the information related to a crash at your fingertips. Professional error monitoring tools provide much more context information than homegrown tools can. The devil is in the details.
- Unlimited error searching and grouping: Perhaps a bug is only occurring on certain OS versions, or a critical error with In-App purchases is affecting the conversion rate of your paid customers. With error monitoring tools, you can always prioritize the errors that deliver the most value for your business.5.
5. Benefit from Solutions that Meet a Diverse Set of Use Cases across Industries
Typically, mid-sized and large companies experience significant advantages by using professional error monitoring tools. These companies tend to have matching requirements and use cases due to similar workflow processes, environments, security measures, etc. That means many features and enhancements are designed and built for companies with comparable goals. If your engineering team aspires toward the standards of another company, find out what error monitoring tool they use. Whatever it is, it most likely suits your company's needs.
Additionally, third-party error monitoring solutions have the experience to meet the needs of different industries. If you’re considering a professional error monitoring tool, find out what types of companies also use the tool. See if they service companies in your industry since everyone benefits from improvements based on the feedback of other customers. Hint: Sometimes a customer logo won’t be displayed on their marketing website, so take advantage of meeting a company at a trade show and ask what they use.