Beta testing user "console log" error retrieval strategy

Ionic Framework ionic-v3
1

I’m currently involved in beta testing of a new app, and we’ve had a couple of hiccups here and there. The hardest thing about solving the issues (as always) is being able to recreate them. So, I’m trying to figure out the best way to retrieve the equivalent of console logs from any given user.

Right now, every time that there is a button push on the app that I suspect might cause problems, I’m making an entry in a “debug” section of our database that logs who/what/when, but this is obviously not sustainable for larger testing circles as well as not being able to catch errors when there is no internet connection.

The best case scenario would be a log file on each user’s phone that they could send (or it could be retrieved) if there are problems. I looked at Filelogger but it doesn’t support ionic 2. I’m currently trying to get FPA file appender working from this thread entry by viklele to work, but I’m running into dependency issues.

What do people do in this situation? What strategies do you use when the testers aren’t super tech savvy in order to try to do remote troubleshooting on ios and android?

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Look into Rollbar and Sentry (and similar). These are services for collection JS errors, but you can also send debug data and arbitraty events to them.

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Thanks for the suggestion Sujan12… I had no idea that this even existed!

Just for those people reading this in the future, this is what I’ve found:
As of right now, it looks like rollbar doesn’t play well with ionic 2 and 3 (https://www.reddit.com/r/ionic/comments/5cwp6b/error_monitoring_and_crash_reporting_with_ionic/)
Sentry, however does work with Ionic 2. I’m going to give that a shot:
https://gonehybrid.com/how-to-log-errors-in-your-ionic-2-app-with-sentry/

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I actually used Rollbar in an Angular 4 project, so you should be able to use it in Ionic as well. I used https://www.npmjs.com/package/angular-rollbar / https://github.com/NextFaze/angular-rollbar

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Ah… Thanks Sujan12. I appreciate it. I’m currently trying to get Sentry working now, but I’ll give rollbar a shot a little while down the road. Thanks so much for a push in the right direction. I didn’t know these services existed.

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