Do I need both error and performance monitoring?

Usually yes, they catch different problems. A game can be error-free but perform badly (janky, slow), or fast but crash-prone, so watching only one misses half the issues hurting players. Error monitoring catches the crashes that end sessions; performance monitoring catches the jank that drives silent churn (players rarely report performance). Complete observability of your game's health needs both, ideally in one place.

Can a game with no crashes still have problems?

Yes, absolutely. A game can be completely error-free, never crashing, yet perform badly: low frame rates, stutter, long load times, and general jank that frustrates players and drives churn. Error monitoring would show this game as healthy, while performance monitoring reveals the real problem. That's why you need both, error monitoring for what's breaking and performance monitoring for what's running poorly, since a stable game can still feel bad to play.

Error Monitoring vs Performance Monitoring

Q: What's the difference between error monitoring and performance monitoring?

Error monitoring watches for things that break, crashes, exceptions, and errors, telling you when your game fails outright (your stability window). Performance monitoring watches for things that run poorly, low frame rates, frame drops, stutter, slow loads, telling you when your game works but feels bad. One is about correctness (is it breaking?), the other about experience quality (is it running well?). Both drive churn, in different ways.

Quick answer: Error monitoring watches for crashes and errors, things that break; performance monitoring watches for slowdowns, frame drops, and jank, things that run poorly. A game can be error-free and still perform badly.

Error monitoring and performance monitoring are two pillars of observability, and they watch for different kinds of problems: failures versus slowness. Both hurt players, but in different ways. Here's how they compare and why you want both.

What Error Monitoring Watches

Error monitoring watches for things that break: crashes, exceptions, and errors. It tells you when your game fails outright, an unhandled exception, a crash, a server error, and is your window into stability. Error monitoring answers 'is my game breaking?', capturing the failures that end sessions and frustrate players.

Bugnet's error and crash monitoring captures failures from the field, grouped and ranked. Error monitoring is about correctness and stability, the binary of working versus broken, and it's essential because crashes are among the worst player experiences.

What Performance Monitoring Watches

Performance monitoring watches for things that run poorly: low frame rates, frame drops, stutter, long load times, jank. It tells you when your game works but feels bad, slow, choppy, unresponsive. Performance monitoring answers 'is my game running well?', capturing the degradation that frustrates players even when nothing crashes.

Bugnet captures performance data from real devices, so you see the frame drops and slow loads players experience. Performance monitoring is about the quality of the experience, not whether it works but how well, and it matters because players churn from jank just as they do from crashes.

Why You Need Both

They catch different problems, and a game can fail one while passing the other: error-free but performing badly, or fast but crash-prone. Watching only errors misses the jank driving silent churn; watching only performance misses the crashes ending sessions. Complete observability needs both.

Bugnet covers both errors and performance in one place, so you see the full health picture. So treat error monitoring and performance monitoring as complementary: errors for what's breaking, performance for what's running poorly, both driving churn in different ways, and monitor both to know your game's true health.

Error monitoring watches for what breaks (crashes, errors); performance monitoring watches for what runs poorly (frame drops, jank). A game can be error-free but slow, or fast but crashy. Most games need both.