Honeybadger - Error Monitoring

Exception monitoring, uptime monitoring, and cron monitoring for web applications. Get notified when things break and track down bugs faster.

Quick Overview

What is Honeybadger?

Honeybadger is a monitoring platform that tracks exceptions, uptime, and cron jobs for web applications. It helps developers identify and fix issues before they impact users.

Key Features

• Exception Monitoring - Track and analyze application errors
• Uptime Monitoring - Monitor website and API availability
• Cron Monitoring - Ensure scheduled tasks run successfully
• Performance Insights - Track slow queries and requests
• Team Collaboration - Assign and track error resolution
• Integrations - Connect with Slack, GitHub, and other tools

Student Benefits

With the GitHub Student Developer Pack:

• Free Small plan for the duration of student status
• Up to 7,500 errors/month tracking capacity
• Unlimited team members for collaborative projects
• Full feature access including all monitoring types
• Email and Slack notifications for critical issues
• 30-day error retention for debugging analysis

How to Redeem

Prerequisites

• Active GitHub Student Developer Pack
• Web applications or APIs to monitor

Step-by-Step Process

1. Access the Offer

   • Visit your GitHub Student Pack dashboard
   • Find the Honeybadger offer section
   • Click to activate your free plan

2. Create Honeybadger Account

   • Sign up using your student email
   • Verify your student status
   • Complete team setup

3. Integrate with Projects

   • Install Honeybadger SDKs
   • Configure error reporting
   • Set up monitoring checks

Best Uses for Students

Application Development

• Debug student projects with detailed error tracking
• Monitor deployment health for course assignments
• Track API performance in web applications
• Ensure background jobs complete successfully

Learning DevOps

• Professional monitoring practices used in industry
• Incident response and error resolution workflows
• Performance optimization through detailed insights
• System reliability and uptime tracking

Academic Projects

• Capstone project monitoring for portfolio inclusion
• Group project reliability tracking
• Research application monitoring for data collection
• Hackathon project stability assurance

Getting Started

Error Monitoring Setup

Ruby/Rails:

# Gemfile
gem 'honeybadger'

# config/honeybadger.yml
api_key: 'your_project_api_key'
environment: 'development'

JavaScript/Node.js:

const Honeybadger = require('@honeybadger-io/js');

Honeybadger.configure({
  apiKey: 'your_project_api_key',
  environment: 'production'
});

// Automatic error capture
Honeybadger.beforeNotify((notice) => {
  notice.setUser({ id: 1, email: '[email protected]' });
});

Python/Django:

# settings.py
HONEYBADGER = {
    'API_KEY': 'your_project_api_key',
    'ENVIRONMENT': 'production',
}

# Automatic Django integration
INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'honeybadger.contrib.django',
    # ... other apps
]

Uptime Monitoring

# Monitor website availability
curl -X POST https://api.honeybadger.io/v1/check_ins \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer your_token" \
  -d "url=https://your-student-project.com"

Monitoring Types

Exception Tracking

• Automatic capture of unhandled exceptions
• Custom error reporting for business logic issues
• Error grouping and deduplication
• Stack trace analysis with source code context
• User context and custom metadata

Uptime Monitoring

// Monitor API endpoints
const checkHealth = async () => {
  try {
    const response = await fetch('/api/health');
    if (!response.ok) {
      Honeybadger.notify(new Error(`Health check failed: ${response.status}`));
    }
  } catch (error) {
    Honeybadger.notify(error);
  }
};

Cron Job Monitoring

#!/bin/bash
# In your cron script
curl https://api.honeybadger.io/v1/check_ins/your_check_in_id \
  -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer your_token"

# Run your actual job
python manage.py cleanup_database

# Report completion
curl https://api.honeybadger.io/v1/check_ins/your_check_in_id \
  -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer your_token" \
  -d "status=success"

Error Analysis and Debugging

Error Details

• Full stack traces with file and line numbers
• Request parameters and environment variables
• User information and session data
• Browser and device information for web apps
• Deployment tracking to correlate with releases

Performance Insights

# Track slow database queries
Honeybadger.context({
  user_id: current_user.id,
  action: 'search_products'
})

# This slow query will be captured
Product.where(name: params[:query]).includes(:categories, :reviews)

Custom Notifications

import honeybadger

# Custom error with context
honeybadger.notify(
    error=Exception("Payment processing failed"),
    context={
        'user_id': user.id,
        'payment_amount': amount,
        'payment_method': method
    }
)

Team Collaboration Features

Issue Assignment

• Automatic assignment based on code ownership
• Manual assignment for specific team members
• Escalation rules for unresolved issues
• Workload distribution tracking

Notification Management

# Configure notification rules
notifications:
  email:
    - [email protected]
    - [email protected]
  slack:
    webhook_url: "https://hooks.slack.com/..."
    channel: "#dev-alerts"

Integration with Development Tools

• GitHub Issues - Automatically create issues for errors
• Slack Integration - Real-time error notifications
• Jira Integration - Track errors in project management
• PagerDuty - Escalate critical errors for immediate response

Common Student Use Cases

Web Development Projects

// E-commerce application monitoring
app.post('/api/checkout', async (req, res) => {
  try {
    const order = await processPayment(req.body);
    res.json({ success: true, orderId: order.id });
  } catch (error) {
    // Automatically captured by Honeybadger
    res.status(500).json({ error: 'Payment processing failed' });
  }
});

API Development

# RESTful API error tracking
@app.route('/api/data', methods=['POST'])
def create_data():
    try:
        data = validate_and_save(request.json)
        return jsonify({'id': data.id}), 201
    except ValidationError as e:
        honeybadger.notify(e, context={'payload': request.json})
        return jsonify({'error': str(e)}), 400

Background Job Monitoring

# Sidekiq job monitoring
class DataProcessingJob < ApplicationJob
  def perform(dataset_id)
    dataset = Dataset.find(dataset_id)
    
    Honeybadger.context(dataset_id: dataset_id)
    
    # Process data - errors automatically captured
    dataset.process_and_analyze
    
    # Report success
    Honeybadger.event('data_processing_completed', {
      dataset_id: dataset_id,
      records_processed: dataset.records.count
    })
  end
end

Performance Monitoring

Application Performance

• Response time tracking for web requests
• Database query performance monitoring
• Memory usage and resource consumption
• Third-party service response times

Custom Metrics

// Track custom performance metrics
Honeybadger.addBreadcrumb('User search initiated', {
  category: 'performance',
  metadata: { query: searchTerm, results_count: results.length }
});

Learning Resources

Documentation and Guides

• Integration guides for all major frameworks
• Best practices for error handling and monitoring
• Performance optimization techniques
• Incident response procedures

Educational Content

• Monitoring strategies for different application types
• Error handling patterns in various programming languages
• Debugging techniques using monitoring data
• System reliability engineering principles

Support and Help

Getting Assistance

• Honeybadger Support - Email support for technical issues
• Documentation - Comprehensive guides and API reference
• Community Forum - Connect with other developers
• GitHub Education Support - For Student Pack issues

Common Questions

• SDK configuration - Setting up monitoring for different frameworks
• Error filtering - Reducing noise from expected errors
• Performance tuning - Optimizing monitoring overhead
• Team management - Organizing projects and permissions

This tool provides professional-grade monitoring capabilities that help students build reliable applications and learn industry-standard practices for application observability.