What Triggers an Error Notification?

May 16, 2013

Something we've noticed lately is some confusion about what actions lead to an error notification. This is important because certain errors do not count towards your rate limit. This limit is the number of errors Airbrake will catch per minute, and scales based on the plan you're on.

When a new error comes in, Airbrake reviews information about the error to determine whether it's a new exception, or just another occurrence of a previous error. The factors Airbrake looks at to make this determination are below:

  • The error class of the error
  • The file in which the error occurred
  • The line number at which the error occurred
  • The action that was running when the error occurred
  • The controller that the action is in
  • The RAILS_ENV that was set when the error occurred

Missing emails?

We also explicitly do not send emails for the following errors, as they are far too common and would just become noise:

  • ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound
  • CGI::Session::CookieStore::TamperedWithCookie
  • ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken
  • ActionController::RoutingError
  • ActionController::UnknownAction

Resolved notices

If you "resolve" an error group from within the application, don't worry -- if it comes in again, we'll "unresolve" it, and send you another email to indicate that it's been re-opened. This is part of the benefit and purpose behind the resolved feature. You should be able to remove from your immediate view anything you believe is dealt with, but have the confidence to know that you'll see it again if there are future problems.
Have further questions we didn't address with this post? Shoot me an email - justin@airbrake.io.