Error monitoring and notification for RoR

I'm helping on a small RoR app. I need to set up error monitoring for it. errbit or exception_notification both look pretty good. This is a small app right now (< 200 users with logins, probably only a dozen logged in at any 1 time right now), so the needs are modest.

It’s for a non-profit, so there’s 0 money. It’s running on DigitalOcean (Ubuntu).

The project uses PivotalTracker & Slack, so it’d be fantastic to have hooks/plug-ins to interact with those, but that’s not a requirement.

Any recommendations for either ruby gems or Unix tools?

(Been quite a while since I needed to set this kind of thing up.)

I haven't used errbit, but I've deployed exception_notification to like 30 apps and it's always worked fantastic. Errbit looks cool, but that requires you to run a separate app?

The nice part about exception_notification is it's super simple and can post to email or slack or whatever is convenient for you without much setup. The downside is it doesn't collect messages anywhere, so you'd have to track them inside Slack or Email or whatever and that can be a fairly big downside if you have to manage a lot of exceptions.

Starting simple is definitely the way to go with this project. Sounds like exception notification will do just fine for now. Hopefully it won't be a "lot" of exceptions. :-)

Ya, it looks like errbit requires a separate app. Would be fine if I was monitoring many apps, but that is definitely not the case with this.

You'll find out pretty quick, and sometimes you might get exceptions you might want to ignore or whatever like a bot typed in weird crap into the URL that Rails can't parse and it's fine to ignore. There's always those odd things to deal with. I've been really happy with it on those similar apps where I want to know if something goes wrong, but it definitely doesn't justify money or running another service for it.

Let me know how it goes! And now I really want to check out Errbit myself...

the fact that errbit uses mongo does not make me happy. (or at least that it's not made such that you can use whatever backend you want) and that you apparently need to run a job to 'clear out' errors or else errbit will slow down.... :-( (I don't have any perspective on what # of errors you need to be generating for that to be an issue, but I've come across enough mentions of having to do that 'clearing out' to make me suspect it's not all that many.)

Thanks for the good & quick feedback. (and that is why it's worth paying you some of my $ !)