Context and breadcrumbs
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The issue detail view is most useful when an event explains who was affected, what the application was doing, and which deployment produced the failure.
Structured event data
BugHQ accepts these categories of context:
| Field | Best use |
|---|---|
user | Stable user id and optional non-sensitive contact fields |
tags | Low-cardinality values used for filtering and grouping decisions |
contexts | Structured device, runtime, order, or application state |
extra | Additional debugging values that do not fit a standard field |
breadcrumbs | Recent actions leading to the error |
session | Session-level identifiers and state |
release | Deployed version that produced the event |
environment | Production, staging, development, or another deployment stage |
The collector keeps at most the 100 most recent breadcrumbs and enforces payload, message, stack, and metadata limits.
Data minimization
Do not send passwords, authentication headers, cookies, payment data, private keys, or entire request bodies. Prefer opaque ids over complete records. Remove sensitive fields in beforeSend and repeat redaction on server integrations where possible.
Good breadcrumbs
Useful breadcrumbs describe state changes and user intent:
- Route changed to
/checkout/payment. - Payment method selection changed to
card. - API request to
/ordersreturned status 503. - Retry 2 started after 500 milliseconds.
Avoid high-volume, low-signal entries that hide the actions immediately before a failure.