The very popular Airbrake, an error-tracking tool for developers, announced today a brand new dashboard. It’s a “modern UI for modern developers.” If you’re not familiar, Airbrake, which was acquired by Rackspace in March of this year, collects errors generated by your web or mobile application and lets you know when they occurred, under what conditions, and the information needed to fix the error.
As you can imagine, this is powerful information and thousands of others agree judging by their impressive list of users. To date, Airbrake has more than 40,000 customers and is used by some of the big names in tech, including Groupon, TaskRabbit, Exec, Hotel Tonight, Zendesk and even Soundcloud.
The founder of Airbrake, Jonathan Siegel, came up with the idea when he realized that getting insight into how applications were performing in production was extremely painful. For us non-tech people, let me explain. When a new website or application is released, customers are the ones who are going to be using it most often. (That’s who it was built for, right?) So what happens when they encounter an error? Of course, the user realizes it. But, how will the developer know when this happens? That’s what Airbrake does. It will catalog and alert you when things go wrong.
The other thing that Airbrake 2.0 has done with this new release is to completely rebuild their back-end with Go, also known as Golang, a relatively new programming language. It was developed by Google in 2009 and is an open-sourced programming environment. This new architecture will allow them to handle 30,000 requests per minute, which is important considering Airbrake tracks over 12 million errors per day, sending nearly 8 million emails a day notifying its customers.
What do you think about the latest update from Airbrake? Is your company using it to track errors?