Exceptional Blog

Today we’re deploying a small list of updates based on the great feedback we’ve been getting. We’ve lots of bigger ones on the way, but we’ll be pushing little changes like this so you’re not kept waiting.

Dashboard details

The goal of the dashboard is to allow you to have a quick (10-second) glance at the state of all your apps. It still has some way to go, and we have some fun improvements planned. But for now, we’ve added some handy stats on the number of open, closed and ignored exceptions in each app with a link to each state within the exceptions index.

Close all exceptions

In the future, users with a large number of different exceptions will need more powerful browsing tools. We’ve got some half-baked features that will be polished and tested over the next month to help these guys out. But for now, one much-requested feature is a way to zap all open exceptions and see which ones crop up again (closed exceptions that reoccur in your app will reopen and you’ll get notified about it).

Notifications digest

I’m especially excited about this one. One of Exceptional’s key benefits is that you no longer get spammed with exception notifications. But, as we’ve learned with some help from our larger users, if you’ve got a lot of exceptions going down in your app, threaded and throttled notifications (Exceptional only mails you once on the 1st day an exception occurs, then on the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 8th, 13th, 21st, 34th, 55th, 89th, 144th, 233rd, 377th, 610th, 987th, 1597th, 2584th, 4181st, 6765th… (recognise that sequence?)) just aren’t enough. If you have 500 new exceptions in a day, you get 500 mails. So…

We now only notify you by mail / SMS / Twitter / Campfire a maximum of six times each day. The first five are just regular as-it-happens notifications. This covers 80% (at least) of our users. The next is a digest!

We’ll be listening carefully to your feedback about whether or not this is right for you. We’re still learning and the digest over time will become a lot more useful.

Performance tweaks and other stuff

We’ve made a long list of fixes and tweaks which I won’t bore you with, including performance enhancements at the app level right across the board. Hope you like them! Please keep the great feedback coming and stick with us as we roll-out some far more significant changes and features over the next few weeks and months.