How do I debug my back end in production?

Question

We're a small startup running Node for our backend. Using a combination of LogDNA, FullStory, Sentry and Mixpanel across frontend and backend.Problems I face:1. Can't trace user journey: User reports a bug. I look through logs with a timestamp of the user report, but can't trace the user journey, especially with lots of asynchronous operations going on in parallel2. Insufficient logging: I can identify the error being thrown but can't identify the cause. Would want to see logs of surrounding code which we maybe didn't logTo solve this, I've resorted to adding logging around the suspected problem path, pushing to production and asking the user to try again (very annoying for them)Any best practices I'm missing or is this really the best way to be debugging issues in prod?

zadkey · Accepted Answer

I'm not familiar with nodejs backends specifically, but for web applications in general it should be possible to run a local copy of the web application with the same code that is being used in production and have it use the prod database connection. And then you can locally step through what is an equivalent of what is in prod with all of your normal local development tools and debuggers.If you get this working, you can follow along steps to reproduce and hit debug breakpoints etc.

XCSme · Answer

Do you get the stack trace of the error?