Automated crash reporting

One of the bottlenecks with Iguana 6 was the effort required for customers to work with us to report crashes.

Crashes with Iguana 6 were not frequent but if they occurred it was a very manual process to upload them

Customers would need to find the dumpfile, contact support, upload it. They would have to find the time to do so and notice a crash had actually occured.

Support would then need to work with development to analyze the crash report on a special machine.

The process was very slow and tedious. Definitely a bottle neck.

With IguanaX we have completely automated the process - it took us 24 hours with IguanaX

I had the idea on Thursday night, 24 hours later the team had the solution implemented.

We set up a IguanaX instance in the cloud which receives the crash reports via HTTP.

See Web Services

This is what our IguanaX crash server looks like - you could do this too!

It was super simple. Just two components - the webservice component receives the crash reports from Iguana. These are queued into the Slack Notifier.

Within seconds of an IguanaX crash happening the development teams gets a Slack notification of the problem

Here’s an example:

Simple and effective - bottleneck removed!

It’s not the most polished system but boy does it make a powerful impact in our ability to serve our customers, locate problems and fix them fast.

From the development team’s perspective it’s one of the most useful sources of information - they can see the line in the code causing the problem. If the customer has followed this process:

Identify your Iguana

It means we can reach out and help the customer get the fix.

There is no patient health information in these reports.

They are in plain text and you can confirm that for yourselves - we’ve made it easy to see these reports in plain text so you see exactly the information that is being shared. We have your best interests in mind.

You can see these crash reports in the product

Go to Settings > About:

Then you will get the crash list, this is from an early version before got most of the bugs out:

Then click on the View Crash File Information, you may see a list of crashes:

If you click on the link you’ll see something like the following:

This is how we eliminated a bottleneck in our own processes to make a better product for you our customers.