When you’re working to trace the origin of a bug that delays launch for your chat integration — or worse, affects your end users — every minute counts. That’s why we’re excited to announce an update that brings Stream Chat API event logging and error reporting into the Stream Chat Dashboard. The new Chat Logs page displays your app’s API requests in a convenient table designed to make it easier and more intuitive to troubleshoot your app integration, saving time and frustration along the way.
Skip to technical documentation for the new Chat Logs feature→
Chat Logs Use Cases
The Stream Chat API and SDKs serve as a pre-built foundation to stand up any type of in-app chat functionality or standalone messaging application in a fraction of the time it would take to code from scratch, with enterprise-grade performance, reliability, and scalability built in. Stream Chat is designed to be as easy as possible for developers to integrate and use, but your app’s unique design, complexity, and use case may still require some experimenting to achieve your desired implementation outcome. The new Chat Logs feature makes debugging easier and faster than ever, reducing the need to manually locate error codes via the command line.
Accessing Your Chat Logs
If you’re already up and running with Stream Chat, just navigate to the dashboard for your desired application and select Logs from the Chat dropdown. New to Stream? Activate your free trial to start building with the most advanced chat API and SDK platform available.
Chat Logs Contents & Navigation
The new Chat Logs table aggregates the most critical event info into one place, with each event color coded so you can spot API error response codes immediately. Error response codes will display with a red marker on the left, while all others will show in green. You’ll see the following fields in the table by default:
- Event Time
- HTTP Method (i.e. CREATE, GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, PATCH)
- API Endpoint (i.e. connect, update_users, etc.)
- API Response Code
💡 Locate and troubleshoot a particular event even faster by filtering the logs by a particular response code, type of API request, time, or user ID.
Expand Details to View Error Messages
For more detail to support your debugging process, just click on an individual event to expand a side panel with fields like API key, client data, and request duration. When an event is flagged red with a 4XX error response code, the associated error message will display in the expanded side panel. You can also adjust the date range from the current day to the current week or month, or select a custom date range, and all of the values in the details pane can be copy/pasted as desired. If the request does not contain a value for a certain parameter, the associated field will show as empty in the side panel.
Additional Chat API & SDK Improvements
Our goal at Stream is to deliver the most intuitive experience possible for dev teams working to integrate state-of-the-art chat functionality into any type of application — and we’re constantly striving to make that process even easier. The new Chat Logs feature is just one result of an ongoing effort to remove friction for developers in the chat space, understand the problems facing them and their end users, and build out Stream Chat solutions that help meet those needs.
If you find the Chat Logs feature useful, you’ll love the additional improvements we recently released in our updated Android and iOS chat SDKs. These include updated tutorials, new sample apps to demonstrate possible SDK implementations, and SDK support for a host of new API features like Slow Mode, Pinned Messages, Autocomplete Search Filters, and more.
