Automatic click and history breadcrumb tracking

[brendonrapp]

Honeybadger collects the following breadcrumbs automatically:

• Clicks
• Console logs
• Errors
• History/location changes
• Network requests (XHR and fetch)

This feature alone made us very nearly move to Honeybadger, and it's still being considered. But as we dug deeper into Appsignal and saw how close it was to matching this, we decided to give Appsignal's breadcrumbs a shot.

plugin-breadcrumbs-console and plugin-breadcrumbs-network obviously give us part of that list already. But an automatic click tracking plugin and an automatic history/pushState tracking plugin would be a major boost to this function.

[unflxw]

Hi @brendonrapp! Thank you for reaching out to us.

Consider plugin-window-events for reporting uncaught errors as well! I'm not sure if this covers what Honeybadger refers to as "error breadcrumbs" -- we do not report errors as breadcrumbs, but rather, we report breadcrumbs within errors.

About history/pushState tracking, would you give this gist a try? If this is useful to you, we may turn it into a plugin.

Would you explain a bit more about the use case re: click breadcrumbs? We could look into making it so that certain clicks (opt-in by developers) get tracked, but I'm not sure about tracking every click.

[brendonrapp]

For click tracking, I mostly mean clicking interactive elements (links and link-like objects, buttons, etc). Based on HB's example screenshot, that's what I took their "clicks" tracking to be. (To be fair, I probably should have actually investigated what the reality of the feature was and where its boundaries are before using them as a reference point)

I agree that tracking every single meaningless mouse click would be unnecessary and not add any value.

I think the "errors" part of HB's list is probably just a case of semantics, ie. they include the error as the final breadcrumb in the list, even though it's redundant because the list itself is being displayed in a view for that error. So I'm not worried about that particular bullet point.

I will take a look at the window events plugin and that gist. Feels like the AppSignal offering is a lot closer to feature parity than I first suspected, which is making me feel good.

[unflxw]

To do

• Add optional history/pushState functionality to plugin-window-events (see gist above)