Error grouping

Flare groups similar error occurrences into errors to make understanding what's going on in your application easier. This is especially useful when you have a lot of error occurrences in your application.

At the moment, Flare has two algorithms to group errors: an older algorithm we introduced when we launched Flare and a new algorithm that resolves a few issues in the old one.

Newly created projects will already use the new algorithm. Still, if you have an older project, you can switch to the new algorithm by going to the project settings and updating the algorithm on the grouping settings page.

Be aware that the new algorithm will only be applied to new errors, not those the old algorithm has already grouped. This may cause duplicate errors to appear in your project for a short time because the new algorithm will group errors differently and may create a duplicate when the old algorithm has already grouped the error.

The grouping algorithms work as follows:

The new grouping algorithm

PHP

Error occurrences are grouped by stage, exception class, top application frame file, and line number. The top frame will be used if no top application frame is found. When an external service like a database or Redis is down, all the errors will be grouped.

Setting the application path

Since Error occurrences are also grouped by the frame file path, if your project's path differs between deployments, you can set the application path in your application, which will make the grouping relative on your application's base path instead of absolute.

Flare::applicationPath(base_path());

JavaScript

Error occurrences are grouped by stage, exception class, and exception message.

The old grouping algorithm

PHP RequestException

Error occurrences are grouped by stage, exception class, and exception message.

PHP QueryException

Error occurrences are grouped when the external service is down. Otherwise, the error occurrences are grouped based on stage, exception class, and the failed query.

PHP

Error occurrences are grouped by stage, exception class, class, top frame file, and line number.

JavaScript

Error occurrences are grouped by stage, exception class, and exception message.

Customizing grouping

In some cases the default grouping algorithm may not be sufficient for your project. In these cases, you can customize the grouping by specifically targeting exception classes which should be grouped together.

You can find more information on this in the specific language documentation.