Back in May we launched a new crash monitoring platform primarily aimed at solo developers, hobbyists and startups, ensuring you can get all of the important crash and error notifications from your entire stack, from mobile applications, to web frontend and web backend etc at an affordable price but most importantly easy to manage and not get overwhelmed by the deluge of data you can get from other providers which can make it seem more complicated.

This is still at a very early stage and we want to be open and transparent about our progress not just for CritiMon but for Boardies IT Solutions as a whole. Which is where this post comes in, we want to tell you how it went and what we're doing next.

Before we start talking about the specifics of CritiMon, lets just give a brief overview of Boardies IT Solutions and what we're trying to do in case you don't already know.

Who is Boardies IT Solutions?
Boardies IT Solutions is currently just myself - Chris Board. I run it in my spare time around my full time job as a Support Manager/Developer for a local telecoms software company.

In the past I've released the odd library and the odd Android app but not really advertised other than just posting it on our Facebook/Twitter and blog posts. We've had relative success although nothing major, but we're trying something new. We want to create something more main stream and really push it to make it a success as this something I really believe in.  

What is CritiMon and why did we develop it?
As mentioned above, CritiMon is a crash and error reporting service that works for any programming language and any platform. There are several official libraries ranging from mobiles apps to web but if there's not an official library, an API is available for you to build a custom SDK to use.

Over the years I've built different things in different programming languages and platforms and wanted an easy way to get crash and error reports from my applications and APIs. I had a look around at what was available and I found a lot of them focussed on a particular language or platform. This wasn't really an option for me, I didn't want to have several accounts for various different crash and error reporting services for different platforms. Other services that were available, did provide an ability to be cross platform and cross programming language, but these I found to be quite expensive, and when I looked at trials for them, some of them provided a huge amount of information, which sometimes appeared a bit overwhelming as not all of it really mattered to the crash.

I therefore came up with the idea of building it myself. Initially, there was no intention on releasing it publicly, I was just going to use it as an internal crash and error reporting and found that it was so useful I investigated whether its something I could release for everyone no matter the situation you are in, and their became CritiMon.

Initial launch of CritiMon
Before we launched, we created a pre-launch site for users to sign up their interest, we did some advertising, via Facebook, Twitter and Google, although wasn't a huge amount of advertising (it gets expensive real quick) we received around 40+ signups. This probably does sound like much but seeing as it was a pre-release announcement and the advertising was fairly limited, I was fairly pleased with this.

A few weeks later in May we launched CritiMon and opened up signups to the service, this is where it got slightly disappointing, although we had 40 people sign up to the pre-release notification, nobody actually signed up to the service.

But I'm not giving up, I really feel that this is a useful service for other developers and startups who develop software whether PC/Server/Mobile or websites whether frontend/backend etc.

Relaunch of CritiMon
Over the past few months, I've been working hard to add extra features, improve the sites landing page (I think the previous one was a bit boring and didn't really explain CritiMon all too well). Below is a list of changes that we are making to CritiMon which we hope to release in the next couple of weeks.

• New Landing Page
  The new landing page looks a little more interesting (I hope you think so too), it also highlights how simple it is to add the libraries/SDK to your existing projects and highlights all of the features and functions for CritiMon

Preview of new Landing Page

• More Libraries/SDKs
  We've added more libraries and SDKs to monitor crash and error reporting. The list now includes:
  * Android (Java & Kotlin)
  * C# (.Net Framework & .Net Core)
  * C++
  * PHP
  * Javascript
  We've also added an ability on the "Register new App" page to suggest new languages and/or platforms so we can focus on what users of the platform want
• Activity Dashboard
  There is now an activity dashboard where it shows you current state of your organisations crashes and error reports, such as how many crashes are assigned vs unassigned, number of crashes per a platform, number of crashes you've received in the past month. There is also an activity stream so you can see when new versions have been detected, when someone within your organisation resolved a crash, add a note to a crash, or mentions someone within a crash note.

Activity Dashboard

• SMS notifications of new crashes
  On a paid plan, you have the option of enabling SMS crash notification. Whenever a new crash that's not been seen previously has been detected, you'll always receive an email notification but you can optionally have an SMS sent with the crash details. You can specify which crashes are sent, e.g. only handled or unhandled, or crashes which have a severity rating of critical etc.

SMS Notification Settings

• Change of Domain
  When we re-launch CritiMon we will be changing the domain where CritiMon is accessed. Currently it is a subdomain of Boardies IT Solutions i.e. https://critimon.boardiesitsolutions.com. We will instead be putting CritiMon onto its own domain for easier access which will be https://critimon.com.

We plan on releasing the next version within the next couple of weeks, but we want to hear from you. Whether you have a feature request, a question, or if you were going to signup up but decided against it, we want to know why, whether its good or bad, we want to hear from you.

You can either leave a comment here or drop me an email at [email protected].