User hotspots

What are User hotspots#

User hotspots are aggregated data of users who experienced errors with your app. The aggregation is sorted by the amount of error occurrences that the user has stumbled upon.

User hotspots can display:

• name
• email
• user id
• username

Some information may be missing depending on the notifier you use.

How do User hotspots work#

User hotspots are calculated from the context/user payload that an Airbrake report contains. Usually this payload is populated by Airbrake notifiers automatically, so you don’t need to do anything special in order to make User hotspots work.

However, there are certain circumstances when context/user is not populated:

• your notifier doesn’t support the feature
• the context of the error doesn’t provide user information (e.g. the error happened in a worker)
• your application doesn’t expose user fields the notifier tries to read (for example, User#email doesn’t exist)

That said, it’s still possible to use User hotspots with any notifier that allows modifying the error before sending it. If you notify Airbrake manually and have the user in the context, you can attach the user to context/email manually.

Using Ruby:

my_user = ... # initialize user

Airbrake.notify('oops') do |notice|
  notice[:context][:user] = {
    id: my_user.id
    name: my_user.name,
    email: my_user.email,
    username: my_user.username,
  }
end

Using JavaScript:

my_user = ... # initialize user

airbrake.notify({
  error: err,
  context: {
    user: {
      id: my_user.id
      name: my_user.name,
      email: my_user.email,
      username: my_user.username
    }
  }
});

Using Golang:

notice := airbrake.Notice("operation failed", nil, 3)
notice.Context["user"] = map[string]string{
  id": "1",
  name": "Kyrylo Silin",
  email": "kyrylo@example.com",
  username": "kyrylo",
}
airbrake.Notify(notice, nil)