Honey badgers are pretty badass. Honeybadger.io is not badass at all, but it tracks errors and monitors web applications with ease.

Installing it for a production Rails app is super simple. Just do what they tell you after signing up. This will install the gem and generate a config/honeybadger.rb that sets your API key among other options. I prefer to remove the hard-coded API key here and replace it with a Rails credential called honeybadger_api_key that was added via rails credentials:edit.

api_key: "<%= Rails.application.credentials.honeybadger_api_key %>"

Just deploy the updated Gemfile, Gemfile.lock, config/honeybadger.rb, and config/credentials.yml.enc and that's all there is to do to get Honeybadger live.

Check-Ins

A useful little feature of Honeybadger are so-called "check-ins", intended to monitor cronjobs and the like. For example, if you have a regularly scheduled background job, a check-in will tell Honeybadger, that the job has indeed run. If a check-in does not occur within a given time frame and grace period, something must be up and Honeybadger will alert you.

Using the official Honeybadger Ruby gem, it is very easy to trigger check-ins. When creating a new check-in in the Honeybadger web app, you receive an ID which can then be passed to a .check_in class method:

Honeybadger.check_in('1MqIo1')`

For this website, I'm using the rufus-scheduler¹ to perform various background jobs. At the end of each job, a check-in is triggered:

scheduler.cron '0 */2 * * *' do
  # do stuff
  # ...  

  Honeybadger.check_in('1MqIo1')
end

The free "Basic" plan allows you to create five check-ins.