October 26, 2023

Harness Continuous Error Tracking Now Generally Available: Accelerate Error Identification and Resolution with In-Depth Code-Level Insights

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Since the public preview announcement of the Harness Continuous Error Tracking Module, we have been receiving valuable feedback from our customers about how they are using Harness Continuous Error Tracking (CET) to identify and fix errors faster early in their software development lifecycle. 

Since the public preview announcement of the Harness Continuous Error Tracking Module, we have been receiving valuable feedback from our customers about how they are using Harness Continuous Error Tracking (CET) to identify and fix errors faster early in their software development lifecycle. 

Efficient troubleshooting and real-time error tracking are crucial for a good developer experience. Today, developers are spending a lot of time gathering context and sifting through logs, to identify errors and find root cause of issues. Designed with developers in mind, CET is set to redefine how you approach, address, and resolve troubleshooting challenges, empowering you to deliver cleaner code and more robust applications faster than ever. We have incorporated the valuable feedback from our customers into new features and are excited to announce General Availability of the Harness CET module

“As a developer, having a comprehensive observability solution has been a game-changer. With Harness CET, we can identify errors and exceptions in our code as soon as they occur, and proactively address them before they become bigger issues. This has not only improved our application's reliability but also saved us a lot of time and effort in debugging and troubleshooting,” said Huy Hoang, Manager of Software Engineering at Ritchie Bros.

State of Code Quality Management

Today, developers spend up to 75% of their time debugging, which takes away from innovation. Continuous Error Tracking is on a mission to help developers spend less time debugging and more time innovating.

Why do developers spend so much time debugging?

  • No context: The person who originally wrote the code may have moved on, so the person debugging it has no context.
  • Forgotten context: The developer may have moved on to other tasks after pushing the code, so they need to regain the context before they can debug it.
  • Flaky tests: Flaky tests can promote unreliable deployments to downstream environments, which can cause incidents in production and cost businesses money.

How does Continuous Error Tracking help?

Harness CET provides full context into errors across your development pipelines, allowing developers to release quality code faster with confidence. With Harness CET developers can:

  • Detect and Fix errors early in the software development lifecycle with complete context into code variable data, logs, stack trace, machine and environment data including the offending line of code for every error.
  • Reduce manual toil by automating the error troubleshooting process
  • Get Insights and Prioritize remediation efforts to focus on the most important errors first.
  • Track Deployment Quality with insights into error trends across deployment versions. 

Key Features

Harness CET currently supports all JVM based languages like Java, Kotlin, Scala and more. Let us review the core features in Harness CET, designed for software developers and engineering teams.

Resolving Errors using Runtime Code Analysis:

  • Error Event Summary:  Get a high level overview of your services monitored by Harness CET and quickly drill down to focus on services that are introducing new errors and regressions.

  • Event Explorer: Access the list of all the exceptions that a service is generating for a selected  time frame. View the contextual data associated with these exceptions by clicking on each exception.

  • Automated Root Cause Analysis (ARC) Screen: Easily access and view the rich contextual data, beyond just logs, for each exception. This includes recorded variables, the responsible code snippet, environment data, machine specifics, and a comprehensive call stack associated with each error event.

Manage Hiding and Resolving Error Events:

  • Some error events that occur in your system are insignificant or known issues. You can easily hide these events from the event list and notifications.
  • Developers can mark the error events as “Resolved” once they fix the issue. This helps track regression errors in future deployments.

Notifications:

  • Setup rules to get notified when new, critical, or resurfaced (regression) events occur.

Connect your Code Repository:

  • Instantly link the application errors to their corresponding source code, including instrumented code.
  • For every error event, gain streamlined access to code repository, branch, and commits for efficient code change tracing.
  • Enhance the developer collaboration and effective error routing to the right developers. 

Integrations:

  • JIRA: Developers can now effortlessly create JIRA tickets from the event list page. The JIRA ticket will be auto populated with all the necessary context for the event, including a direct link to debug that event on the Automated Root Cause Analysis (ARC) screen. 

Logging & APM Tools: Harness CET integrates with popular monitoring solutions, such as AppDynamics, Dynatrace, DataDog, NewRelic, and Splunk. 

Since our public preview launch, we've been hard at work listening to your feedback and identifying enhancements. Now, building upon our core features, we're thrilled to unveil the latest additions to our lineup:

Event Distribution:

  • The Event Distribution Graph provides an interactive visual representation of error event volume within a selected timeframe. Harness CET allows developers to prioritize errors based on their frequency of occurrence, allowing you to address and rectify the most critical issues first.

Manage filters:

  • Collaborate across development teams using shared filter views for the error event list.  

Enterprise Grade Audit Trails and RBAC :

  • Harness CET provides detailed audit trails to help companies meet compliance or IT policy requirements. The RBAC model allows implementation via a role based permissions system to satisfy unique organizational requirements.

Comprehensive Dashboards and Reporting:

  • Harness Continuous Error Tracking (CET) Dashboards provide a centralized source for aggregating error event data across all your projects with customizable views based on roles within the organization. The dashboard offers consolidated insights for developers into error events across different error event types, deployment versions and more, to improve error tracking and decision making.

Self Managed Platform support:

  • Harness CET is available as a standalone module with support for both SaaS, and Self Managed deployment models.

Support and Resources:

  • Documentation: https://developer.harness.io/docs/category/get-started-with-cet
  • Customer Support: support@harness.io
Continuous Error Tracking