Honeybadger Blog
honeybadger.io · Company blog · on HN since 2012
Honeybadger's company blog covers error monitoring and developer topics in Ruby, Elixir, Git, UUIDs, and job queues.
What HN saysHN links it for Ruby and Elixir technical articles, such as retrying exceptions and Elixir logging, and commenters mention Honeybadger as an error tracking service.
54HN people shared it
12linked it in comments
76stories submitted
212story points
4 months agolast shared
2012people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Error Monitoring, Error Tracking, and Notification for Ruby on Rails8 people · 1 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 2Fuck-That Money3 people · 17 points · first shared 2020 · 4 comments on HN
- 3Top Ten Git Tips and Tricks3 people · 12 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 4Deep dive into the Elixir Logger module3 people · 10 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 5The APM paradox: Too much data, too few answers2 people · 15 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 6Going Deep on UUIDs and ULIDs2 people · 11 points · first shared 2019 · 2 comments on HN
- 7Elixir Performance Monitoring2 people · 7 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 8Is No PaaS a good idea for Rails?2 people · 5 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 9Shipping Rails Logs with Kamal and Vector2 people · 5 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 10A deep dive into Solid Queue, a DB-backed queueing system2 people · 5 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 11The Inadequate Guide to Rails Security2 people · 3 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 12AngularJS and Rails 4 - A Step by Step Tutorial1 people · 12 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 13Elixir background jobs: choosing the right tool for the job1 people · 9 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 14The case against using RubyGems.org in production1 people · 8 points · first shared 2013 · 1 comments on HN
- 15Observable Systems with Wide Events1 people · 7 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
starrhorne · 2012-11-30
You might like Honeybadger: https://www.honeybadger.io/
Full text search, a lightning-fast drill-down UI, and advanced collaboration tools make Honeybadger the best option to manage Rails errors. IMHO
Since our public launch we've gained a lot of traction. Many of the apps we monitor are household names. For the latest news: @honeybadgerapp.
Sorry for the blatant plug, but you asked. :)
ArturT · 2019-11-23
knapsack_pro gem uses Knapsack Pro API which is paid. See more at https://knapsackpro.com
It works similarly like tools for exceptions tracking, i.e https://www.honeybadger.io is paid but has MIT client https://github.com/honeybadger-io/honeybadger-ruby
Other than that I do support paying customers.
cstrahan · 2019-06-06
Not Java or Python, but here’s some Ruby: https://www.honeybadger.io/blog/how-to-try-again-when-exceptions-happe…
The above article talks about exploiting Ruby's support for call/cc to do something similar.
A noteworthy difference: Ruby's support for call/cc is baked into it's runtime, while in Haskell you can implement call/cc as a normal library. This is done by leaning on Haskell's monadic "do" syntax and a suitable implementation of the Monad class.
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/mtl-2.2.2/docs/Control-Monad-Cont.h…
I'm rooting from my phone, so I can't type up a this-vs-that. But maybe that piques your interest and you can read up on Haskell and programming with monads.
mtmail · 2018-03-12
Thank you for sharing your initial research. Too many AskHN drop a question without hint what the user already looked at.
https://raygun.com and https://www.honeybadger.io/ seem to be US, too.
https://appsignal.com/ is based in Amsterdam.
stympy · 2016-10-21
We are using Elixir/Cowboy at https://www.honeybadger.io to receive log drain data from our customers' Heroku apps. It's reliable and fast, but deployment has been a sort point (we're spoiled by Capistrano). I recently changed the deployment to elasticbeanstalk with the multiple docker image approach, and that has been much nicer.
The ecosystem is still young -- a lot like Rails was in the early days -- so there are rough edges, but I'm betting they will get sorted out, just like they did in Rails land.
rubiquity · 2014-05-21
Were you aware that an exception handling service named Honeybadger already exists?[0]
0 - https://honeybadger.io
gkop · 2020-05-10
My recent use case is needing an alert if a certain metric of my system exceeds a threshold or is not present. The simplest viable alerting tool might take these parameters:
* alert threshold
* comparison operator
* expected datapoint interval (in units of time)
* whether to consider missing data breaching (boolean)
* if missing data is breaching, margin of skew allowed (in units of time)
(assume the tool magically has access to metric source, that’s not important)
I’m not sure whether the concept was named prior to this tool [0], but this tool’s name has become a colloquial term: a “Dead Man’s Snitch” style of alert. Once familiar with the idea, I found an exception-monitoring vendor [1] that I was already using at the time had built this feature in. I quickly found use cases and was broadly able to eliminate large volumes of “cronspam” and email filters in favor of the much more elegant construct — because it was so easy to implement and maintain, it was viable for a whole long tail of second class system metrics that otherwise didn’t deserve proper instrumentation.
CloudWatch on the other hand is lower level and more flexible (naturally with higher learning curve). It fundamentally provides similar value by offloading alerting state and logic to a trusted managed system, but is distinctly inferior for my use case:
* It treats missing metrics as literally breaching the threshold and makes no semantic distinction, which spikes the whole abstraction. You can (only…
lioeters · 2026-07-16
Since the article was written 9 years ago, I wonder what the state of the art is in using concurrency in JavaScript.
Concurrency in JavaScript (2023) - https://www.honeybadger.io/blog/javascript-concurrency/
Modern JavaScript Concurrency (2025) - https://dev.to/gkoos/modern-javascript-concurrency-2025-edition-h84
jjgreen · 2023-07-05
Ruby (and earlier, Perl) formalised this with the __END__ section: https://www.honeybadger.io/blog/data-and-end-in-ruby/
Fire-Dragon-DoL · 2020-11-24
Yes, I was highlighting my view.
To respond to the advantages mentioned:
- Roda (or Sinatra) gives routing. Actually it's very advanced routing that can be composed
- JSON serialization can be achieved more easily with Hash + Array and a subset of basic types (boolean, numeric, string, nil), which are easier to generate than with jbuilder, and it's also more performant. That being said, nothing stops developers from using tilt-jbuilder (gem) to get immediate support from Tilt for jbuilder, which can be used from Sinatra and Roda seamlessly, and can also be called everywhere, not just views
- Roda has built-in security too (I don't know about Sinatra, but I presume it does), there is a section in the README: https://github.com/jeremyevans/roda#security- as well as multiple plugins http://roda.jeremyevans.net/documentation.html#external
- Rails testing is actually _harder_ than normal Ruby testing. On top of my mind, a glaring example of this is the impossibility to instantiate a Controller and do dependency injection on them, which should be normal for any object. This is not a problem if dealing with just Ruby. Rack-test gives the same "request specs" that are present in Rails (actually it's built on top of that). As usual, the option of choosing different testing frameworks is available, given that it's normal Ruby. There isn't a need for special testing framework integration, so it's possible to use the beautiful Test Bench: http://test-bench.software/
- Devise is…
Denzel · 2014-03-05
Sure, it can be accomplished in a variety of ways: swapping a migrated replica; breaking big schema changes into multiple incremental migrations that minimize the amount of time the database is locked and back-filling data; or spinning up an entirely new cluster, migrating everything, and then switching traffic over from the old cluster to the new cluster at the load balancer. Any number of these techniques can be mixed and matched to accomplish minimal and/or zero downtime depending on your constraints. [1] The most important thing is making sure your application code is able to operate with multiple schema versions.
I used to have a presentation from Facebook where they spoke about their zero-downtime migration process, but I can't find it, so this SO post [2] will do. Of course, there's a bunch more information out there to read up on.
[1] https://www.honeybadger.io/blog/2013/08/06/zero-downtime-migrations-of…
[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6740856/how-do-big-companies-like-s…
garrettdimon · 2013-02-17
I've been assembling a list of these lately for a book that I'm working on. (http://startingandsustaining.com) Some of the categories are fairly loose as some apps don't fit nicely into categorical buckets, but hopefully this is a helpful list.
--Browser/Email Testing
BrowserStack (http://www.browserstack.com)
Litmus (http://litmus.com)
--Bug/Issue Tracking
BugHerd (http://bugherd.com)
Lighthouse (http://lighthouseapp.com)
Sifter (http://sifterapp.com) (Disclaimer: I built this.)
--Planning & Project Management
Sprintly (http://sprint.ly)
Podio (https://podio.com)
Flow (http://www.getflow.com)
Interstate (http://interstateapp.com)
Basecamp (http://basecamp.com)
Apollo (http://www.apollohq.com)
Pivotal (http://www.pivotaltracker.com)
Asana (http://www.asana.com)
Trello (https://trello.com)
Blossom (https://www.blossom.io)
Trajectory (https://www.apptrajectory.com)
--Business & Traffic Analytics
KissMetrics (http://kissmetrics.com)
MixPanel (http://mixpanel.com)
DigMyData (http://digmydata.com)
--Continuous Integration / Code Quality
Travis (https://travis-ci.org)
Circle (http://circleci.com)
CodeClimate (http://codeclimate.com)
Sempaphore (https://semaphoreapp.com)
--Dashboards
Ducksboard (http://ducksboard.com)
Geckoboard (http://www.geckoboard.com)
Instrumental (https://instrumentalapp.com)
--Error/Exception Handling
Sentry (https://getsentry.com)
Coalmine (https://www.getcoalmine.com)
HoneyBadger (https://www.honeybadger.io)
BugSnag…