Handling Error Reporting for OpenMRS Instances

As far as I am aware, we currently have no way of people to report errors from the OpenMRS Application. We used to use SCRAP - https://github.com/openmrs/openmrs-contrib-scrap to send anonymous error reports and create JIRA issues. But due to spamming and similar issues being generated multiple times we have blocked anonymous error reporting as mentioned in Are we still using SCRAP for automatic error reporting?. So SCRAP is basically being built into our builds without any purpose.

So going forward,

  1. Do we want to have an ability for people to report errors from OpenMRS Application? (without having to login/register in JIRA and create an issue that will take additional time)
  2. Do we want to use SCRAP in any way for that?
  3. Is there any suggestions for handling spam and repetitive issues?

this needs a response from the community as well as the development team (including but not limited to, @burke, @dkayiwa, @darius , @wyclif , @raff )

A solution can be allowing users to create a talk post for a specific category that will have the ability to follow up instead of having anonymous issues that would have no way of follow up (solution heavily influenced by input from @dkayiwa). Although this need thought for some way to identify the user. Also, this still has the issues of spammers and repetitive cases (if anyone has solutions for these please share).

Unless we want spam again…I can’t enable anonymous issue creation

@r0bby, Completely agree - the current workflow can lead to spam and we blocked it off. But, in between we lost the ability for the user/implementer to report that they are facing an issue directly from the software.

What I’m trying to know from the community is - is this a feature worth having, if yes how best can we provide it.

@maurya How many “valid” submissions were being reported before SCRAP was turned off?

Coming from pre-Internet days, how about the ability to dump the error logs into a file that is easily accessible and easily submitted to Talk or JIRA or even to a specific email address?

@ssmusoke, SCRAP was anonymous reporting, meaning, there was no way of following up with the person who reported it. Also, it created the possibility of same issue being reported multiple times from various different sources with a new JIRA number, and has a very high chance of spam.

I don’t think we were able to justify if it was really worth trying to understand which JIRA issues were “valid” with the above mentioned issues.

If facing an error log, any person can still create a Talk Post to discuss the logs or even create a JIRA issue for it to be resolved.

SCRAP (as far as I understand) was created (before Talk) for users who were not familiar with JIRA and wanted a way to report issues.

@maurya got you now, the key thing I see would be ensure that it is easier to get the error logs and stack traces to simplify reporting \

One thing we could do is aggregate the stack traces somehow

Maybe direct them to Talk?

I personally don’t think end users should be creating JIRA tickets. I think first level support for them should be whoever is managing their implementation. Second level support should be getting help here on Talk, and only once a bug is confirmed should a JIRA ticket be created.

EDIT: I do like this idea:

FWIW, we currently have 4,350 of these reports that need assessment. :smile: project = “Automated Error Reports” AND status = “Needs Assessment”

+1 to Pascal’s point that letting end users of an arbitrarily-configured OpenMRS instance, of an arbitrary distro, report errors directly to the community dev team is way too noisy, and thus pointless.

It would be nice to have a feedback module that lets them report errors directly to their own admins, with enough details to be forwarded on to OpenMRS.

-Darius (by phone)

How many are spam?