openreplay VS sentry-java

- Optimize user experience: use insights to refine and improve your app’s usability.

Interested? For more details, you can check out the GitHub repo [0] or documentation [1]:

[0] https://github.com/openreplay/openreplay or documentation

[1] https://docs.openreplay.com/en/rn-sdk/

Hey HN,

For anyone who uses session replay tools to debug, monitor, or analyze user journeys, this feature might come in handy. OpenReplay — the self-hosted session replay tool that helps developers troubleshoot web apps faster — now supports tabbed browsing.

*Here's how:*

1. Capture and replay user sessions that span across multiple browser tabs, all within a single recording.

2. OpenReplay's tracker communicates across browser tabs, ensuring accurate tracking of each tab, even when duplicated or opened with `window.open` without `_blank`.

3. With "co-browsing", you can watch and support users in real-time and see how they navigate across multiple tabs of your app.

*Why it’s important?*

1. This feature is convenient for developers as it allows them to easily identify bugs by reviewing a complete session in one replay, rather than having to reference multiple recordings.

2. It provides a deeper understanding of the user journey and interactions across multiple tabs in your web app, helping in the comprehension of complex user behaviors and paths.

3. It provides accurate feedback on user tab actions such as opening, switching, and closing tabs, assisting in UX/UI improvements.

Interested? For more details, you can check out the GitHub repo at https://github.com/openreplay/openreplay.

You could maybe get in a scenario where a company rather sneakily changes their license without proper announcement to make usage non-open and billable, but that's pretty rare and bad behavior and that underhandedness may bite them back if it goes to court (I am not a lawyer). That said, it can happen. As an example, see this discussion I opened where the project switched licenses and the maintainers thought it was enough to only really announce this within a 1 hour YouTube video (Rather than their blog or update notes).

OpenReplay would not be typically be considered open source. (Which I have raised with them and have since been blocked from their repos).

How does it compare to OpenReplay ?

> Before deciding on ClickHouse, we were planning to use OpenSearch

You should have tried Quickwit :)

Anyway, sounds like a great project, best of luck!

[1] https://github.com/openreplay/openreplay

[2] https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit

I would disagree with OpenReplay being open source, as I raised with them back in July (I've also since been blocked from their GitHub org for opening that discussion).

>As now we've introduced some peers code review, automatic testing on most critical stuff (but since the codebase sucks these aren't really reliable tests)

They may not be "reliable", but these are your safety net, or harness, so you don't fall. I wrote about similar issues, for instance here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26591067 and, given your promotion, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37211796. It contains a few steps starting from "So...".

You can add monitoring, something like Sentry (https://sentry.io) will capture exceptions that were not handled that you have not seen because the stack trace is buried in hundreds of pages of logs or something. It groups them by exception and counts them. It's pretty awesome. (https://docs.sentry.io). It supports around 108 platforms (Java, Python, JavaScript, etc.). This lets you see the exceptions and makes prioritizing easier (which ones are the most frequent, which ones impact the most, etc.).

If you don't have them already, issue templates are really useful and the comment I linked to explains why, but here's an example of an issue template (again, you can configure them for different types of issues so team members select from a dropdown for a bug or a feature):

But, from my understanding, it targeted only software developers that would like to have super-deep insights into the applications and is not intended for monitoring simple apps like websites. Also, I have no idea even if I embed it, whether will it be able to tell me if my resources loaded or the performance didn't go well. For example, I don't see how I can easily embed it into my website: https://docs.sentry.io/ only programming languages are listed here.

Sentry provides informative guides for many platforms. In our server's case, we apply Apollo Server v2 as an Express middleware; therefore, Sentry's Express Guide with request, tracing, and error handlers is a great starting point.

The last step is to extract the openReplaySessionToken from the header and add it to your Sentry scope (ideally using a middleware or decorator) in your backend. The method to do this depends on the programming language of your backend, you can consult the Sentry docs on how to configure scope. The snippet below shows how to configure a Sentry scope if your backend is built with node.js/express

In a lot of cases crash report SDKs are open source?

Sentry: https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-java