JavaScript Error Tracking

As frameworks for developing websites and web apps have gotten more and more complex, the occurrence, severity, and impact of JavaScript errors has grown significantly. Even worse, the majority of JavaScript errors happen on the client-side and are difficult to identify, reproduce, and track over time. Compounding this issue is the thousands of different operating system and  browser combinations that are possible. 

It’s important to denote that we are referencing front-end JavaScript errors, for tracking server-side JavaScript errors, that’s a whole other story. There are dozens of reasons to track JavaScript errors, our customers typically cite these reasons:

• Reproduction of errors: tracking JavaScript errors, and more importantly, how they were fixed, helps developers fix them more quickly. It may even remove the necessity of reproduction all together, because developers can reference the environment that caused an error in the past. 
• Ensure bugs are fixed: Tracking JavaScript bugs helps your team validate fixes. For instance, if you were tracking a particular bug that occurred 100 times per day then pushed a fix and it occurred 30 times a day, that fix likely wasn’t fully successful for all users. 
• Judge effectiveness of development team: similar to ensuring that particular bugs are fixed, you can also use JavaScript error tracking to help measure the effectiveness of development teams. If a certain developers pushes result in very few bugs over time, they might be worthy of some praise or compensation.
• Determine how bugs affect users: By tracking errors, you can also tell how the errors affect users. For instance, by aggregating and tracking bugs, you can see if certain issues only affect users with Chrome as their browser, or if errors only happen with slow connections. 
• Effectively triage and determine the severity of errors: Related to the benefit above, tracking JavaScript errors helps your team prioritize which bugs to address first and which are critical. Having historical data around errors gives you the ability to start to organize and classify bugs. 

While it’s clear that tracking JavaScript errors is valuable, how do you actually accomplish it? One free-ish option is to create a listener for errors and send a request to a database every time an error is detected. Paid tools like LogRocket provide a central repository of errors along with the context of the errors to determine how they affected users. Get a free trial today.