CritiMon is a cross platform, any programming language crash monitoring and error exception reporting system. We have a number of SDKs and libraries that are available. The official libraries include the following:
– Javascript
– PHP
– C# (.Net Framework & .Net Core)
– Android (Java & Kotlin)
– C++

With just a couple of lines of code you can start sending unhandled crashes, errors that might force close your software/app or stop your web page rendering or displaying information correctly.

However, receiving crashes for just major faults that force close or stop scripts processing are all very well and good, but what about the errors that happen internally and that are handled by your code, such as in try/catch blocks. These errors shouldn’t happen, but in the event they do they get handled, it might not be able to carry on with what it was doing, so you might just display an error to the user and then rely on them sending you a bug report. Can you really rely on your customers reporting issues to you. This is where CritiMon comes in.

Where you need to in your try/catch block, you can send the details of the exception to CritiMon. This will include all the information required to help you debug the problem, such as app version, the file, the line number and some device specific details, such as operating system for example.

Plus if you need to, you can submit custom properties as a JSON object, in any structure you see fit to provide some extra debug information that you might need to determine what caused the issue.

For each crash received, it allows you to assign them to your team members, add notes to keep tracks of what’s happening and have discussions with other team members with a particular error and hide particular crashes that you no longer want to see, for example crashes from previous app versions, specific crashes that you won’t be able to resolve such as external third party API issues or specific hardware bug.

Why We Built CritiMon
I’ve been a developer for 15+ years, as a hobby and as my main job. As an individual developer I was always looking for a crash monitoring platform that would cater for everything I develop in. I develop in a wide range of things such as software applications for Windows/Linux, web frontend and backend and mobile development with Android. There wasn’t a crash platform that would cater for every platform and/or that was affordable and some provide so much information its fairly easy to get lost as its not always relevant to the crash, and signing up for multiple accounts to cater for each platform just wasn’t practical and wasn’t something I was prepared to do.

Another reason was out of the crash monitoring I have tried, a lot of them are delayed in how quickly they notify you about a crash – some up to 24 hours. If I have a problem in a release I don’t want to wait up to 24 hours to find out there’s a problem, waiting that long could have a huge negative impact on a large proportion of our user base.

Another reason was that the Google Play Store wouldn’t always send crashes. We had an app in the play store that had around 500-1000 users with each of our web servers receiving around 2000 requests a day. Then all of a sudden, our user base started plummeting and I couldn’t see any reason why. Everytime I tested I wasn’t able to replicate any issues and the Google Play store didn’t show any crashes or errors within the app. Eventually I tracked it down to a large proportion of users uninstalling were from a specific android version. Eventually I tracked it down to a third party library had received an update automatically from Google Play services and this was causing the crash but unfortunately by the time I discovered this, the damage was already done and the app never recovered. This was the final nail and from this spawned the idea of CritiMon.

If you have any questions then please raise a support ticket via our support portal at https://support.boardiesitsolutions.com or email us at [email protected]