Call to Action: Can everyone promote automatic error reporting?

Announcements
1

Hi everyone,

Enabling automatic error reporting in JetBrains IDEs is super easy. Just go to Settings and then

Appearance & Behavior → System Settings → Data Sharing → Send error reports automatically

It helps us tremendously to prioritize fixes and put our energy into the right things. If you are a plugin developer, please also consider relaying this message to your users, because if you implemented JetBrainsMarketplaceErrorReportSubmitter, your plugin will also receive all reports you cause.

Currently, errors reported to Marketplace do not provide freeze dumps to plugin developers. We want to change that! Everyone who uses JetBrainsMarketplaceErrorReportSubmitter will then see exceptions and freeze dumps that are attached as files during reporting. This makes it much easier to investigate UI freezes that your plugin might have caused. We need more votes on the related YouTrack ticket to increase its importance.

In short:

  • CTA 1: Please turn on automatic error reporting and ask your users to do the same.
  • CTA 2: Vote for the YouTrack ticket to provide freeze dumps in the Marketplace UI

Thanks a lot in advance, and feel free to fire away any questions you might have.

3 Likes
2

Hi,

I think there are two subjects:

  • error reporting for third-party plugins
  • error reporting for JetBrains features

Regarding the error reporting for third-party plugins, I integrated a JetBrainsMarketplaceErrorReportSubmitter into all my plugins a long time ago. Unfortunately, the lack of features and the lack of feedback from JetBrains led me to use my own error reporting tool. This opens a GitHub ticket containing the stack trace, product information, etc., and allows users to discuss and track progress. I know some developers also use tools like Sentry.

I would therefore be happy to be able to use JetBrainsMarketplaceErrorReportSubmitter again, but, if I’m correct, nothing changed. The addition of thread dumps would be a good improvement, but many important features are still missing.
Actually, I’m using my own error reported for my (8) paid plugins. I kept the JetBrainsMarketplaceErrorReportSubmitter on my free plugins because I don’t want to invest more time on them, and I just checked if something changed, but no.

Regarding the error reporting for JetBrains products, I understand that the automatic error submission for JetBrains’ features would be a good thing. Actually, I enabled it on my IDEs, but I don’t see how me, as a third-party plugin developer, I could recommend my customers to enable this feature. The IDE can promote automatic error reporting by itself, you don’t need us. I must admit that would be a bit odd. I need to see some improvements on the JetBrainsMarketplaceErrorReportSubmitter first, then, I would use it and promote it.

2 Likes
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Thanks, Jonathan. Could you share which Marketplace-side features you’re missing?
To us, a clear missing piece are attachments related to freezes and JFR dumps. What else would be helpful here exactly?

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For me, the issue #1 is MP-7104. I can’t say if this is a bug, but I never received email notifications about new error reports. I missed important problems, and I think this was the main reason to implement my own reporter.

Less important but still a bit annoying: MP-7103. I think we should see most recent errors first, not the oldest.

Also, I would appreciate features like:

  • filter issues by IDE name and version, and by plugin version
  • interact with users. At least, users should be able to add information. Per example, how to reproduce the error, their OS name and version, etc.
  • access to their idea.log. It helps a lot

GitHub provides these features (if users agree to share their idea.log file, of course, but I remind them that I really do need this file). The downside is that users need to have a GitHub account, they don’t automatically share their idea.log, and there is a maximum content size when I prefill the issue (all the content is added as url parameters), but I’m OK with that.

Actually, something like YouTrack would be amazing :blush:

1 Like
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There are two things I want to highlight here:

  1. JetBrains reporter enables you to get ALL happened errors when automatic reporting is enabled, not only those that users don’t forget to submit
  2. We are moving towards enabling automatic error reporting by default for all users, for plugins that use JetBrains reporter

It is rather hard to enable this for third-party data sharing for us due to legal side of things.

So the deal is if you want to receive more feedback you may consider using JetBrains reporter, especially if you don’t use any at the moment.

1 Like
6

Unfortunately this is really hard, as we collect errors anonymously and only anonymously now

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And this is a thing that we can’t afford so far ourselves as it contains a lot of of private data, our Support may only ask for it directly

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We can provide a lot of environmental information though, yes