We have nothing for gathering browser exceptions in customer environments

[slimsag]

Today, when in-browser JS errors/exceptions occur, we have no way to identify them. We don't have anything gathering them, nothing reporting them to the users or site admins, and no way to easily ask users if they are occurring.

To see how painful this can make debugging some issues, see https://github.com/sourcegraph/infrastructure/issues/1514

When a user runs into a problem and a JS exception is occurring and we don't know about it, what is our plan to debug those problems?

[felixfbecker]

nothing reporting them to the users or site admins

We do have support for reporting to Sentry, and we do generally show errors in the UI + log them to the console

[slimsag]

Sentry:

• I am not aware of any single customer actually using this, so in practice it doesn't exist.
• If we did ask all customers to use it, wouldn't they all need to purchase licenses for it? Given we run on-prem, there would also be security concerns from our larger enterprise users.
• We need something that works everywhere, in all of our deployments, and by default.

Shown in UI and Console:

• The problem is that errors aren't always shown in the UI (when they are, we're ok) and in that case asking users to open the console to look for errors is not easy and feels like asking them to debug the problem for us. As an example of this, you can see the first thing I did in https://github.com/sourcegraph/infrastructure/issues/1514 was ask if there were any errors or warnings in the browser console and they clearly responded stating there are not. They must've overlooked them, and it led to a lot of back-and-forth which made it very difficult to debug.