[aneth]

Is there a reason to use any of these services given how trivial it is to set up an open source alternative? You can push errbit to heroku in 5 minutes and you're done.

Perhaps there is a level of service here and a business I don't see, and I'm a huge heroku and third party service user, but I don't see the need for a monthly service fee to aggregate and send exception notifications. It's either a self deploy or a feature of an overall monitoring service like NewRelic.

[jballanc]

Having used Airbrake (when it was Hoptoad), Exceptional, email notifiers, NewRelic, and "rolling your own", I would say that there is definitely value in having a service to handle this for you.

Rolling your own is more effort than it's worth. On top of that, exception tracking is not something you want to have to worry about when your world comes crashing down, and that's exactly when a hand-rolled solution is most likely to fail. (i.e. Are you running your hand-rolled tracker in the same Heroku instance as your app? Then how do you know what went wrong when your app comes down? Are you running it as a separate Heroku instance? Why are you wasting money/resources running twice as many instances as you need?)

NewRelic is nice in the way that it integrates with other charting/reporting for your app. However, on a day-to-day basis, too many errors/exceptions are not caught by NewRelic making it ultimately unreliable. Also, you don't get nearly enough context with error reports to be able to debug the root cause (though they have been improving in this regard).

Email fails as a solution the first time you accidentally deploy an error that gets hit 500 times a second. This is especially true if your app, itself, needs to send emails. I've witnessed a situation where exception email notifications have caused message rate-limiting to kick in preventing customer targeted emails from being sent. Now you have two problems!

I won't say that Airbrake or Exceptional are perfect, but they are good for what they do. Obviously every situation is different, and you have to weigh the pros and cons (e.g. How much traffic are you receiving? Do you have a dedicated Ops team that can handle deploying/maintaining a hand-rolled solution? How much revenue are you loosing because of exceptions? Is your app targeting individuals that are likely to be turned off the first time they see a 500 page? or can you afford to have uncaught exceptions for now?). By no means, though, would I dismiss these solutions out of hand.

[Vitaly]

It all depends on how much you value your own time. It never takes just 5 min. And over the course of a year it migh easily take hour(s) of development time that is better spent on improving you product.

Heroku does the same thing for example. They are quite expensive if you compare them to running on raw ec2, but when you factor in the time that you need to spend to build and maintain your own infrastructure Heroku "suddenly" looks like a very good deal.

[nathan_f77]

Errbit can literally be set up in 5 or 10 minutes. Either on Heroku or on your own server. And if you are currently using Airbrake in your Rails app, all you need to do is add one line to your config, and it's done.

That's a great point about Heroku though - there should definitely be an open source EC2 framework that provides a similar infrastructure...

[ctide]

You can use Airbrake for free (https://airbrakeapp.com/account/new/Free), and it takes about 3 minutes to setup and you don't have to think about it. Sure, you don't get automatic deploy notifications built into Capistrano, but I've certainly upgraded my Airbrake plan for various apps in the past and will do it again.

Why would I want to concern myself with maintaining another app when I can just use Airbrake?