TenderNest runs in three places. There's the iPhone app, the Android app, and a server sitting between them doing the work neither phone can do on its own. For a long time I only had crash reporting on two of those three.
That's not unusual. The tool I'd been using, the kind that comes bundled with a lot of mobile setups, only really does phones. It catches a crash on someone's device, bundles up what happened, and sends it to a dashboard I can look at later. It had been ticking along in the background for months and I'd never had a reason to think harder about it.
Then I spent about two weeks on the server. Specifically on the code that checks whether someone actually paid for a subscription before handing them the paid features. It's fiddly work. There are a lot of ways for it to go slightly wrong, and most of those ways don't announce themselves. A payment gets checked against the wrong thing, or a renewal doesn't register, and the person just doesn't get what they paid for while everything looks fine from the outside.
If that happened, I wouldn't know. The dashboard I check would show me nothing, because it wasn't watching that part of the app at all. It only saw the phones. The one piece of code I'd just written and trusted the least was also the one piece with nothing keeping an eye on it.
So I moved everything onto a tool that covers all three. The phones and the server report to the same place now, and a server error shows up next to a phone crash with the same kind of detail attached. That was the whole reason I did it.
I also realised I'd set up monitoring under an account tied to my day job. I moved it to an account I control independently. A small bit of housekeeping, but one I should have done before attaching my own product to it.
None of this is exciting. It doesn't add a feature or fix a bug a user would ever notice. But shipping code that moves money around and having no way to hear about it when it breaks is the kind of gap you only spot once, and then can't stop thinking about.
