Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of one of the most requested new features for paid Hoptoad accounts, and one we’ve been really looking forward to ourselves since we rolled our paid accounts for Hoptoad in December—Integration with Lighthouse.
This new feature allows you to seamlessly associate errors in Hoptoad with an existing ticket in your Lighthouse project, or to create a new ticket for the problem, all from within Hoptoad itself.
Creating a ticket for Lighthouse from Hoptoad
This error in Hoptoad has been associated with a Lighthouse ticket
This Lighthouse ticket links back to the Hoptoad error.
Searching for an existing ticket in Lighthouse to associate with this error.
If you have a paid Hoptoad account, at any level, this feature is available to you now. Directions for setting it up can be found on the hoptoad tender site.
One of these things is not like the other
Having worked with other applications that integrate with Lighthouse, we’ve been frustrated with the fact that it only allows you to supply the Lighthouse API token for one user, and then all activity in Lighthouse appears as though that one user performed it. This is fine for a basic level of use, but really gets hard to follow if you’re a heavy lighthouse/ticketing user and rely on the identities behind each account mapping to real world clients and developers that you also email and talk to on the phone.
To address this, we thought it was important that the Hoptoad integration with Lighthouse accept an individual API token for each user in your Hoptoad account. That way, when someone uses Hoptoad to create a new ticket, or associate with an existing one, it shows up in Lighthouse as the actual person who performed it.
So what happens
When an error comes into hoptoad, you were already able to resolve it, but that was about it. Sometimes that’s fine, but often times we found ourselves wanting to discuss the ticket with other developers, or have some better way to communicate with clients about an issue with their application.
We’ve often gotten the suggestion to add simple commenting on errors in Hoptoad, to facilitate this discussion, and have resisted. We feel pretty strongly that we don’t want Hoptoad to become a bug tracker, and adding comments to the errors would send us straight in that direction. So, instead, with this Lighthouse integration, we’ve set a clear demarcation point.
Now, when an error comes into an account with lighthouse support enabled…
- You are notified about it via Email or RSS
- You investigate the error, creating a new ticket for it or associating it with an existing ticket
- Discussion about the cause of the error, the solution, or the weekly company poker night ensues on the Lighthouse ticket
- Once the everything is done, the Hoptoad error can be marked as resolved
- Bam!
If you’re the developer of a project management system or bug tracking system that you’d like to integrate with Hoptoad, please get in touch with us.
FYI: Hoptoad/Airbrake was sold to RackSpace and is now called Airbrake Bug Tracker.