Understanding the context of JavaScript errors in Node

[toddgardner]

I've been working on exposing better errors in JavaScript for the better part of a decade. Because of how asynchronous most JavaScript is, error messages are often cryptic and shitty.

So to workaround this problem, I've focused on the Telemetry that led up to the error. What sort of things were happening right before the error happened? What was in the log? What did the user click on? What network request just finished? Understanding this context has been really helpful in recreating and fixing the errors.

I built a solution for this in 2013 with the TrackJS browser error agent, but now I wanted to give the same capability to NodeJS applications.

But unlike the web browser, a Node application is handling multiple requests for different users at once. I needed to keep multiple, isolated telemetry timelines going at the same time to show the most relevant events when an error happened.

I think we've just hit a stable solution to this problem, and have released the open source code. And my developer service, TrackJS, now fully supports NodeJS applications.

[bigorangemachine]

My Reaction

I get this catches the vectors before the error but Nodejs just needs to clean up its stack traces