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Errbit
MITErrbit is an open-source, self-hosted Airbrake alternative that keeps application stack traces and crash reports within your private infrastructure.
Open-source alternative to — compare it against:
Overview
Stephen Crosby created Errbit in 2010 during open-source Fridays at Relevance to provide a self-hosted alternative to the Airbrake exception tracking service. By matching the Airbrake notification API, it allowed development teams to collect unhandled application errors without sending internal stack traces to a cloud vendor. Maintained today by Igor Zubkov, the project continues to serve as an on-premises error collector for privacy-conscious web teams.
Why Errbit instead of Airbrake
Airbrake and Errbit both capture unhandled runtime exceptions, group them into issues, and alert engineers before users report bugs. The difference lies in data custody. Unhandled exceptions frequently expose database queries, session tokens, authorization headers, and customer records in stack traces and request parameters. Sending unredacted error payloads to a multitenant cloud service creates external compliance obligations and vendor dependencies. Errbit runs inside private clusters or behind corporate firewalls, ensuring diagnostic data never leaves internal systems.
Because Errbit implements the Airbrake notification protocol, migration requires updating client host URLs rather than rewriting telemetry code. Existing libraries point directly to the self-hosted instance. However, Airbrake provides managed scaling, route latency metrics, and performance dashboards. Errbit limits its scope to exception aggregation, leaving server provisioning, storage retention, and database maintenance to the internal operations team.
What it does well
- Airbrake API compatibility, letting applications in Ruby, Python, PHP, or JavaScript report exceptions through standard client libraries by updating the host URL.
- Configurable error fingerprinting that aggregates notices by exception class, backtrace, and controller action, with per-application override rules.
- Direct issue tracker integration with GitHub Issues, allowing developers to create repository bug tickets directly from error summaries in the web interface.
- Out-of-the-box notifications via Slack, email, and custom webhooks to alert on-call engineers when new exceptions occur or error frequencies surge.
- User context reporting that displays authenticated account identifiers and session data alongside stack traces to simplify troubleshooting customer-reported defects.
- Environment-variable configuration supporting LDAP authentication, GitHub organization restrictions, and worker queue adjustments for container environments.
