Matt Arbesfeld CEO @ LogRocket

LogRocket: DVR for JavaScript apps

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Understanding problems in web apps is hard. Between mysterious JavaScript errors, user-reported bugs, and issues caught in QA, there’s a constant struggle to get ahead of the problems affecting your users. And these are just the obvious issues — most bugs are never actually reported since users who have a bad experience just leave or suffer in silence.

Traditional error-reporting tools only solve part of the problem. They’re helpful for knowing when you push broken code, triggering alerts for JavaScript exceptions, but often lack enough context to understand root cause. They also neglect user-reported issues and bugs that aren’t explicit code errors. UI glitches, slow performance, broken interfaces, and even confusing UX all negatively affect user happiness and your bottom line.

Enter LogRocket

LogRocket is a new type of developer tool. It’s like a DVR for web apps, recording literally everything that happens on your site. Instead of guessing why problems happen, you can replay sessions with bugs or user issues to quickly understand the root cause.

LogRocket instruments the DOM to record the HTML and CSS on the page, recreating pixel-perfect videos of even the most complex single page apps.

In addition, LogRocket records console logs, JavaScript errors, stacktraces, network requests/responses with headers + bodies, browser metadata, and custom logs. It also has deep integrations with libraries like React, Redux, and Angular to log actions and application state.

A LogRocket report showing session video, network requests/responses, and logs

Development and product teams use LogRocket throughout their development cycles to:

Fix bugs quickly

LogRocket surfaces and aggregates errors in your front-end application. Every error is shown in context of the user session with a full video replay. Watching the video replay helps you understand what the user did to trigger a bug, as this is often not evident in the original bug report.

Network requests, JavaScript exceptions, and code bugs are all captured and replayed in LogRocket, and since the video is a faithful reproduction of the DOM, you can inspect the original HTML/CSS to understand and reproduce UI bugs.

Understand error impact

Some JavaScript errors are completely innocuous. By watching the video from when an error occurred, you can easily tell if it actually affects users, or can be ignored.

Know what caused backend errors

When triaging backend errors, it can be unclear why the frontend made an unexpected request. LogRocket integrates with backend logging and error reporting tools to show you the corresponding frontend session logs for every backend error and log entry.

Support

LogRocket integrates with Intercom and other support tools so when a user writes-in needing help, you can watch exactly what they’re seeing and guide them to a solution.

Sometimes, it’s unclear if a user is just confused, or actually experiencing a bug. By looking at the console and network logs from their session, you can easily make this distinction.



Improve key flows and discover UX issues

Since LogRocket records everything, it can intelligently find bugs after the fact. You can search and filter based on events like show me users who did my onboarding but didn’t convert, or let our automated system detect moments of user frustration like rage clicks and broken buttons.

LogRocket lets you search and filter for sessions by properties like User Email, Name, Signed Up Date, Location, Status, Duration, Page Visited, and many, many more. If it happened in your app, chances are you can find it with LogRocket search.

This is only the beginning

The application-level logs that LogRocket collects is a particularly compelling data set. We constantly learn of new and interesting use cases from the thousands of developers around the world that have integrated LogRocket in their apps.

We offer a GraphQL API for accessing session-level and aggregate logs which developers have used for integrating with internal systems, data analytics, and custom interfaces. If you’ve built something cool with the LogRocket API, we’d love to hear from you.

Closing Thoughts

At LogRocket, our goal is to help developers and PMs build better experiences for their users. Toward this end, we are constantly adding new features to help with fixing bugs, supporting users, and understanding UX issues.

We’d love for you to give LogRocket a try and tell us what you think! You can get started here at https://logrocket.com.

PS. If you love building developer tools, we’d love to meet you. We’re hiring.

Matt Arbesfeld CEO @ LogRocket

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