Flutter remote logging

Question

I'm releasing an app for a client soon, and I'm concerned about supporting the product over time, and I'd like to get some ways of logging exceptions and general info during operation.

I'm thinking of using the F_Logs package https://pub.dev/packages/f_logs to store data on the device until I get a call about a problem. Then, I'll have the user (There are about 30 or so) press a button to upload the file to an endpoint on my server to read what they have.

Is this commonly used? Are there better options or best practices out there?

Award

Answer 1

Well there are several options, some of the common ones are Crashlytics and Sentry.

I prefer https://sentry.io/ because you can host it yourself, alternatively you can use their free package to get started. If you use firebase anyways then you can just use Crashlytics.

With both you can send crash reports but also simple events with messages.

There are other options but I have not used them, you can check the web for alternatives but keep in mind that you need a Flutter client library for these kinds of services.

Capapie

Answer 2

It's an old question, but I will answer anyway. We were successfully using both solutions. We used Crashlytics for catching crashes and non fatal errors, but also we were used (slightly modified for our purposes) FLogs library.

FLogs were used to store debug logs for last 2 weeks. In case we were not able to reproduce the issues using Crashlytics information (stacktrace + some breadcrumbs) we asked user to send the logs explicitly. Our logs were processed by the server and send to logging service, which allowed us filtering the logs (by text, date, user id etc.)

It allows us have more insights to the application, and how user behaved, which is something we cannot achieve with Crashlytics alone.

So, if your application flow is fairly easy and you would like to track crashes and non fatal errors, you can stick with any bug tracking tool. But if you need more insights, I would suggest described flow which was battle tested on production.

Beitz