Analyzing Error Reports

When a software release is made and CrashRpt support is enabled in your software, sooner or later you start receiving crash reports.

To check the integrity of received crash report files, you may calculate MD5 hash for your error report and compare it with the MD5 hash that is attached to the error report. When you receive error reports using HTTP connection, the MD5 hash is passed to the server-side script through the 'md5' parameter. When you receive error reports using email, the MD5 hash is attached to the email.

Count of received crash reports may depend on robustness of your software to various exceptional situations and on popularity of your software. So it's nothing unusual if you receive hundreds of error reports a day. If there are many incoming error reports, you can monitor and analyse them for some period of time after release, and prepare a hot fix release.

The purpose of the error report is to help you determine the reason of the problem and try to fix it. The keyword is 'try', because in most cases you can't fix crashes as you usually do with normal bugs. You usually can't reproduce the error on your machine, so you can't guarantee it is fixed. Typically, you make fixes in parts of code that could cause the crash most probably and release a new version of your software. For some tips on doing such code modifications, see Making Your Code Robust.

The normal scenario is that your software becomes more and more stable with each evolutional release and less and less error reports are received.

The Structure of an Error Report

A crash report is a ZIP file containing several files, such as

• crash minidump (crashdump.dmp);
• crash description XML (crashrpt.xml);
• optional desktop screenshot file(s);
• optional screen capture video file;
• and other optional application-specific files, for example, log files.

For more information about using crash description XML and crash minidump, see Using Crash Description XML and Using Crash Minidump.

For information on how to automate error report processing with a web-server or with a command-line tool, see Automating Crash Report Processing.