We made a community error dashboard for DEV

Software development is more fun with friends; that's why we've built tons of collaboration features into Honeybadger over the years, making it easier for teams to fix errors.

Earlier this year the team at DEV emailed us with a feature request: could we make it easier to involve the broader DEV open source community in the error-fixing process?

Today, we're excited to announce a new feature that does exactly that: Public Dashboards.

[Read on to learn more about public dashboards and how to enable one for your own Honeybadger project. If you want to help DEV squash bugs in Honeybadger, they wrote about how to get involved.]

A public dashboard is a secret URL that you can share with outside users (such as contractors and open-source contributors). When you use the share button (see below for details) from the error details page, that error appears on the public dashboard for your project—making it easy for everyone to discover new errors to fix.

Backstory on the share button

Most DevOps tools do not adapt well to community projects, where the team is continually changing. It's is a problem we've thought a lot about in the past: open-source benefits from anyone in the world being able to jump in and fix an error, but sometimes the needed production data is private.

To begin to address the problem, we added the ability to "share" an error with an outside user, scrubbed of all PII (Personally Identifiable Information, such as user IDs and session data). This single feature made it easy for core teams to share vital debugging information (such as error messages and stack traces) with community members without a ton of copy/pasting:

The Community Dashboard

DEV wanted us to take this a step further and create a public dashboard where the community could see existing production errors and contribute a fix. We loved the idea so much that we fast-tracked it and are launching it today.

Of course, not everyone wants a public dashboard for their Honeybadger project, so it's disabled by default. To enable it, head over to Settings -> Advanced -> Enable Public Dashboard, and flip the bit:

Feel free to send the unique dashboard link to just a few team members, or share it with the world.

Conclusion

We are stoked to have the opportunity to work with the DEV team on this, and can't wait to see what other open source communities do with it.

If you're involved in an open-source community that runs production applications, Honeybadger is for you. It's also free for non-commercial open-source projects. Sign up today!