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Crash reporting is a technique allowing to receive user feedback and improve quality and stability of your software. To enable crash reporting in your app, you integrate it with a light-weight library also named a crash reporter.
The crash reporter's function is to automatically report crash data to the software vendor. Crash reports often include data such as stack traces, type of crash, and version of software. This information helps software developers to diagnose and fix the underlying problem causing the crash.
If the application sending the crash reports is not stable enough and/or popular enough, software vendor will receive tons of crash reports that need to be stored, organized and analyzed.
CrashFix is able to process crash reports from 32-bit (x86) Windows applications built in Visual C++ IDE. 64-bit (x64) platform is not supported currently.
CrashFix is useful during development, beta-testing and post-release stages of application's life cycle:
CrashFix
A crash report may contain a crash minidump file, crash description XML file, desktop screen shot file(s), registry key dumps, and (optionally) other application-defined files, e.g. log files or application settings files.
Crash reports are delivered over the Internet to your CrashFix server. You may receive hundreds of crash reports a day.
CrashFix server automatically receives crash reports and stores them in database. It processes incoming crash reports and groups similar reports into collections. CrashFix generates statistics report, so you can browse crash report upload statistics, watch their version distribution, top crash collections, bug dynamics, recent bug changes, symbol file upload dynamics and other useful information.
CrashFix is able to process crash reports from x86 Windows applications built in MS Visual C++ IDE.
CrashFix is useful during development, beta-testing and post-release stages of application's life cycle. CrashFix allows to continuously collect and analyze crash reports received from users of your C++ app around the world helping to reproduce and fix most popular bugs, improve software stability and prepare hot-fix releases. For additional information, please refer to our Crash Reports page.
CrashFix groups similar crash reports into collections.
Among hundreds of crash reports there may be only several different problems, while others just duplicate the information about these problems. Opening so many reports manually and analyzing their content may become boring and take a lot of time. Grouping duplicate crash reports allows to concentrate on most popular bugs. This makes it easier to analyze crash reports - you do not have to view many crash reports in turn, instead you may view a single crash report or several crash reports from a collection, analyze them and (if desired) open a new bug for the entire collection. For additional information, please refer to our Collections page.
CrashFix has a built-in bug tracker.
When you open a crash report from a collection, you decide whether to take an action on it later. For example, if you can reproduce the crash, you may decide to fix it later. In this case you open a bug for the collection. A bug is a synonym of a problem. CrashFix allows to associate bugs with crash collections and/or with individual crash reports. Ideally, crash collections and bugs are in one-to-one relationship, meaning each crash collection has exactly one bug. The bug tracker allows several project members to collaborate: a developer may enhance the code that caused crash, a quality assurance engineer may verify that the problem has been fixed, and the project manager may monitor what bugs are not fixed yet. For additional information, please refer to our Bugs page.
CrashFix is able to generate statistics reports.
Statistics is important for understanding the progress of crash report analysis. For example, statistics may show how many crash reports have been received, what are the most popular crash types, how many bugs have been opened and/or fixed, what bugs have been modified recently and so on. CrashFix can produce statistics digest allowing to see crash report dynamics and version distribution, bug dynamics and other. CrashFix can present statistics in form of text summaries and diagrams (pie charts or line graphs). For additional information, please refer to our Digest page.
CrashFix has a simple administration model.
Crash report files being sent by an application to CrashFix server are received and stored in project space. If a user needs to access the project to browse and modify crash reports and/or perform other actions, the administrator may assign the user a role in the desired project. A project has associated disc quotas defining how many disc space the project may occupy. For additional information, please refer to our CrashFix Administration page.
CrashFix can be installed on infrastructure totally controlled by you.
CrashFix is a server software hosted on your own server infrastructure (but not a web-service). This advantage is especially valuable in corporate environment where crash reports and debugging symbols must be stored privately as sensitive data. Why to send your data to a third-party web-service when you may store it on your own server? For additional information, please refer to our Installation page.
CrashFix runs in both Windows and Linux operating systems.
CrashFix can be installed to a machine running Windows or Linux. Installing it in Windows is a bit easier and more suited for evaluation. CrashFix server supports Linux, because most server infrastructure is Linux-based. Installation instructions for the most popular Linux distributions (for example, Ubuntu or CentOS) are provided.
Further reading: Architecture Overview
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