Welcome! This guide will show you how to use Fullstory to find, diagnose, prioritize, and resolve bugs and issues, leading to a better user experience.
If you're looking for best practices for setting up your Fullstory account, check out our Getting Started Guide for Admins.
Here are the key learnings we'll explore:
- Get instant context in your bug tracker: Diagnose faster, with all the context inside your bug tracker (e.g. Jira).
- See the user's experience: Get the full visual so you don't need to reproduce the issue.
- Quantify the impact of a bug: Answer the next critical question: "How many users is this affecting?"
- Debug efficiently: Leverage the rich diagnostic data, including console logs and network activity.
- Proactively find & monitor issues: Get ahead by finding top issues, then creating alerts for new or spiking errors.
Get instant context in your bug tracker
By using our out-of-the-box integrations, you can bring context about a ticket directly into your bug tracker (e.g. Jira) so you don't have to go hunting for screenshots or reproduction steps.
To learn more about the steps behind this ideal setup, see our Integrations section.
What you'll see in your bug tracker
Inside a ticket, you'll find everything you need to know at a glance:
- Description, provided by the colleague that submitted the ticket via Fullstory.
- Session URL, timestamped at the moment the user experienced the issue - no need for reproduction steps.
- Metadata from the user's session, including the URL where the issue occurred.
Learn more:
See the user's experience
Fullstory autocaptures nearly every interaction (clicks, scrolls, page views, and more) so you don't have to wonder what a user did. A session is a video-like replay of how a user interacts with your website or app.
Find the user experience
Clicking the timestamped link in your bug tracker is the fastest way to watch a session, but if you are triaging issues without a pre-existing ticket or URL, use Omnisearch to find sessions. To do this:
- Click Search in your left-hand sidebar
- Type what you're looking for, then click on it.
- You can search by user identification (e.g. email address), engagement (e.g. clicked text), user friction (e.g. dead clicked), and more.
- Once you find what you're looking for, scroll down to the Session Playlist.
- Click Generate summary to quickly summarize the most recent sessions for that user or group of users.
- To view an individual session and see the experience, click the play button.
See the user experience
Here are some key areas to help you navigate when watching a session:
- Play/Pause: Plays and pauses the session.
- Note and Share: Leave a comment for a colleague or share a link, timestamped to the exact moment in the session.
- Event speed: Speed up, slow down, or skip periods of inactivity to get to the action faster.
- Event stream: On the right side, see a log of every action the user took. Search for an event, then click on it to jump to that exact moment in the session.
- StoryAI: Customers with StoryAI Premium can analyze a session to surface insights faster.
- Dev Tools: When you suspect a technical bug, use Dev Tools to inspect the console, see network requests, and view page performance data to find the root cause. (We'll cover more on this later).
- Page Insights: Pause the session and quickly quantify page-level issues for all users, like most error clicks, rage clicks, and dead clicks.
Learn more:
- Getting Started with Session Replay
- Getting Acquainted with OmniSearch
- StoryAI Session Summaries
- How do I share notes or session links with my team?
- Ask StoryAI in Session Replay
- Page Insights User Guide
Quantify the impact of a bug
When watching a session, you may have confirmed an error in the event stream. The next critical question is: "How many other users are affected?"
Answering this turns a single bug report into a data-driven priority. Now you can confidently tell your Product Manager, "This bug has affected 75 customers in the last 24 hours," and prioritize your work accordingly.
Watch this 1-minute video or follow the steps below to quickly find all instances of a bug and quantify its impact.
- While viewing a session, locate the error event in the event stream.
- Click the arrow to the right of the error.
- Explore the pre-made metrics that appear in the pop-up window to see how many times the error has occurred, how many users it's affected, and the trend line.
- For further analysis, click into any of the pre-made metrics. A new tab will open, allowing you to scope the event further by browser, device, version, or any other custom property.
- Save and rename any of these metrics to track the bug over time.
StoryAI Premium customers will find an Analyze Segment button to speed up this process.
Learn more:
Debug efficiently
You've triaged the bug and quantified its impact - now it's time to fix it! While viewing a session, Fullstory's Dev Tools provides the technical context at the exact moment a user encountered an issue. Think of it as a time-traveling version of your browser's developer tools, perfectly synchronized with the user's session. This reduces the need to reproduce bugs locally.
You can find the Dev Tools button on the top right of any session.
Here's a high-level look at what you can do:
| Dev Tools Tab | What It's For | How to Use It |
| Console | See every JavaScript error, warning, and custom log that occurred during the session. To search for console errors, you must enable Console Data Capture. |
When a user clicks a broken button in the replay, jump to the Console tab to see the exact error message and stack trace that fired at that moment. |
| Network | Analyze a waterfall of all network requests to spot slow-loading assets, investigate failed API calls, and examine network request and response payloads. To search for network errors, you must enable Network Data Capture. |
If a page is loading slowly for a user, open the Network tab to identify which specific images, scripts, or API requests are the bottlenecks. When Network Data Capture is enabled, see specific payloads from network requests. |
Learn more:
- Guide to Dev Tools
- How do I use the Fullstory Console?
- Network Data Capture
- How do I use the Network view in Dev Tools?
Proactively find & monitor issues
Now that you know how to solve reported bugs, let's get ahead of them. Fullstory allows you to identify widespread issues as they emerge so you can fix them before they snowball. Below are a few different ways to do this.
Find issues that cause friction
You can create metrics to proactively find key error events, like uncaught exceptions, failed network requests, or rage clicks.
To get you ramped up quickly, we created a pre-built issue monitoring dashboard in Fullstory, which is a collection of various metrics for identifying user frustration and errors. You can save this dashboard, edit it, and customize to your needs.
Check out the 1-minute video below on how to navigate this pre-built dashboard.
Let StoryAI automatically uncover your biggest issues
StoryAI Premium customers can use Opportunities to automatically scan for spiking issues. It streamlines the process of identifying problems, conducting root-cause analysis, and tracking resolutions.
Customers who put Opportunities to work for them will accelerate error resolution and minimize disruptions that can negatively impact conversion goals or customer satisfaction.
Stay ahead with alerts
Want to stay ahead of these issues in real-time? In Fullstory, you can create an alert from a metric. When an event crosses a pre-defined threshold, it will trigger a notification in Slack or by email.
This helps you see the bigger picture and maintain a proactive engineering strategy, catching bugs before users even have a chance to report them.
Check out the 1-minute video below showing you how to create an alert with just a few clicks.
Learn more: