How NetEngine Tracks Critical Bugs Using BugSnag

Challenge: NetEngine’s business is based on providing high-quality stable software to its clients, however, developers lost visibility into software when it was delivered to customers and deployed to production. The team was only alerted of errors from customer complaints, leading to an unpleasant experience for developers and customers.

Results: Using Bugsnag, NetEngine has visibility into production errors and can often preemptively fix errors before customers are aware of them. Bugsnag allowed NetEngine to fundamentally change their business model to offer an ongoing contract with clients for software management, and provide an overall better customer experience.

NetEngine’s business depends on creating high-quality software, but without error monitoring, critical bugs went unnoticed.

NetEngine creates web and mobile products for a range of industries, such as travel, health, recruitment, local government, and non-profit. They create Ruby on Rails and JavaScript web and mobile products using proven lean and agile methodologies. NetEngine’s business depends on developing great software solutions for their clients, making it imperative to deliver stable, high-quality software. However, the engineering team had no error monitoring tool in place, which meant bugs in production went unnoticed until a customer complained.

“When a customer finds a bug, they are irritated as is, and they obviously do not want to get invoiced for buggy software,” mentions Bruce Stronge, cofounder and CEO of NetEngine. After a disgruntled customer notified the team of an error, a developer had to try to replicate it, digging through log files, or even contacting the customer to try to piece together what occurred. “Troubleshooting bugs with this process would take an entire day for 2 or 3 of our developers,” states Stronge. “In addition, we would have the customer calling every hour to know if the issue was fixed. All in all, this posed a lot of stress and dissatisfaction for all parties involved, and it was definitely not the type of experience we want to deliver.”

Improving customer relationships with proactive error monitoring

NetEngine sought out an error monitoring tool that would let their developers proactively address bugs, helping them deliver quality software in a timely manner, and therefore create long-lasting relationships with their clients. NetEngine chose Bugsnag as their error monitoring tool because of the ease of implementation and use.

“Because Bugsnag is so affordable and easy to set up, we can use it for every project and not just the large, high-budget ones. The moment our customers have a pilot, they have error monitoring for it.”

— Bruce Stronge, Cofounder and CEO

Thanks to Bugsnag, NetEngine’s developers save valuable time when addressing errors. “We can fix bugs in 30 minutes instead of 2 days,” comments Stronge. “Our customers hardly see any bugs, because we fix them right away.”

Using Slack and TriggerApp integrations to improve efficiency

Bugsnag’s Slack integration is another highly used feature at NetEngine. It lets engineers know immediately when an error occurs, and the impact of it. “Each of our 25 developers now saves 10 minutes every two hours, because they don’t have to search for errors and then alert the rest of the team. We get automatically notified when errors occur,” mentions Stronge. “Another powerful integration is with our project management tool TriggerApp, where tasks are now automatically created and assigned from Bugsnag - a huge efficiency creator”.

Bugsnag has not only allowed NetEngine to save valuable time when troubleshooting exceptions, but they are also able to maintain an ongoing contract with their clients, which is seldom heard of for project-based consulting companies.

“We are easily able to sell the benefits of Bugsnag to our clients,” says Stronge. “By having a maintenance contract with our customers, we maintain ownership of a product, and can more easily find and fix any issues that arise.”