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AppSignal captures the exceptions your application raises, groups them so they are easy to triage, and alerts you when something needs attention. Errors are tightly coupled to traces: an error usually happens inside a request, background job, or script run, and the surrounding trace gives you the timing and context you need to debug it.

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How AppSignal groups errors

When your application reports an exception, AppSignal groups it into an issue with other occurrences of the same error type on the same action and namespace. A single bug that fires thousands of times becomes one issue to triage, not thousands of separate alerts. Each issue keeps a set of samples: representative occurrences with the full backtrace, request metadata (such as hostname, revision, and request path), and any tags you add.

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Triage and notifications

Each issue can be assigned to a team member, given a state and a severity, and configured with its own notification settings. AppSignal notifies you through your configured channels (email, Slack, and other integrations) when a new error is detected.

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Namespaces

Errors are grouped by namespace, so you can separate web requests from background jobs. The default namespaces are Web and Background, and you can configure custom ones. See Namespaces for details.

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Alerting on error rates

Beyond per-error notifications, anomaly detection can alert you when the error rate for an application or namespace crosses a threshold you set.

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Reporting handled exceptions

If you catch an exception yourself, you can still report it to AppSignal with the helper methods provided by your SDK. The exact helper names vary by SDK, but the goal is the same: keep the error attached to the trace, or send it with useful context.

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Add debugging context

To make errors easier to investigate, add more context with: