usermanual
This page describes the usage of the Acralyzer user interface.
When you first connect to your Acralyzer instance, you get an empty dashboard:
First thing to do is login, by clicking on the user menu in the right end of the navigation bar.
Use your CouchDB admin login or a dedicated reader user if you created one. Once logged in, your username is
displayed in the navigation bar and provides access to a few user actions:
- Enable notifications: authorize desktop notifications. This is useful if you keep Acralyzer open in a background browser window or tab, then new reports will be notified with an alert on your dektop. After selecting this menu, you browser will prompt for confirmation.
- Change password: change your user password - might not be available on all hosting services for admin users.
- Logout: disconnect your user.
The dashboard is split in 3 parts:
- timeline chart: you can chose the time unit (per year/month/day/hour/minute/second)
- pie chart: see the distribution of reports depending on several reports attributes (android version, app version, api level, device)
- latest bugs/reports: shows by default the 10 latest bugs, and a second tab displays the 10 latest reports
A bug is an aggregation of all reports having in common their application version code, exception and root exception.
Clicking on the magnifier on a bug sends you to the details of the bug.
Clicking on the magnifier on a report opens the details of this report in the same page (dahsboard).
A direct link on the top right of the report summary allows you to bookmark or share this specific report.
You can get an RSS stream of your reports by copying the link of the RSS icon 
on the top right of the reports list.
This RSS stream requires a login. You can use either your CouchDB credentials or those of a user you have defined as a user for this application database.
In the navigation bar, an indicator shows the state of background polling:
-
background polling is activated, you will be notified immediately when new reports are received. -
background polling is disabled, you have to refresh the browser manually.
Clicking on the polling indicator switches between its 2 possible states.
A bug is a group of reports having in common:
- application version code
- reported exception
- root exception
The Bugs tab in the main navigation opens the Bugs browser, showing all known open bugs.
Bugs are sorted by number of reports, you can also sort by date of latest report or application version by clicking on the columns headers.
Clicking on the down/up arrow reverses the order.
The magnifier icon goes to the details of a bug, the bug icon allows to mark a bug as solved.
By default, solved bugs are not shown. The button Show solved bugs allows to display solved bugs in the bugs list.
First column shows the number of reports per bug, second shows the time when the latest report was sent (and not when happened, as can be different), third column shows the version of the application the bug is contained and the last colum is finally showing the exception of the crash.
The bug details view is actually a special filter applied on the Reports tab. It shows all reports received for 1 specific bug, with an additional header dedicated to the bug description.
In this header, you can:
- toggle the resolution status
- edit a comment (you can use markdown syntax for styling)
When a comment is added on a bug, its magnifier in the bugs list is drawn with a dot in the lens. When hovering with the mouse, the comment is displayed.
The Reports tab is dedicated to exploring your individual reports database. It displays a list of reports in descending
chronological order:
The upper toolbar gives you some control:
- select a filter per android version or per app version
- if a filter is selected, choose one possible value for this filter
- a search box which can refine the results by displaying only the reports in this results set which contain some specific text
- the checkbox "All reports attributes" performs the text search filtering on the full content of the reports retrieved in the current page
The monsters you can see in the first field of each report line represents the INSTALLATION_ID. It can be considered as an equivalent of you users. Each installation of your app is given a generated unique identifier, which is kept through the updates of your app. These monsters are generated with a different variation for each installation ID, allowing you to visually locate reports from the same user in a list.
Below the list of reports, you have two buttons Newer and Older allowing you to browse the database for more
reports.
Clicking on the magnifier button of a report line displays the full contents of this report.
Report Details view displays all report fields as a detailed hierarchical table.
A summary is displayed first with the most used fields:
All attributes are then listed:
Attributes containing array of values are listed as a condensed view. You just have to click on a condensed view to display its whole content.
Once on the report detail view, just click on the INSTALLATION_ID field in the report summary (the monster) to go the list of reports for this specific user (installation).
The Admin tab gives access to some general purposes tools.
The Reports admin section provides 2 ways of purging reports from your database:
- purge reports older than a given number of days
- purge reports older than a given application version code
Be aware that purging thousands of reports can take several minutes. Just be patient.
The Preferences admin section allows for the moment only to select your default application reports storage.
You can create as many instances of the acra-storage as you have applications, as long as you keep the
acra-prefix in the name.
The Users admin section enables you to create new reporter users for your reports databases.
Fill in the login/password and submit the form. Once the user is created, you are given instructions to configure ACRA in your app.
If you're using Cloudant as your hosting, Acralyzer detects it and gives some instructions to let you create your API Key on Cloudant's dashboard.
