Alerting for Kotlin: A Setup Guide

Overview

Monitoring your Kotlin app is only half the battle. Without proper alerting, critical issues can go unnoticed for hours, impacting users and revenue.

Bugsly provides a first-class Kotlin integration for alerting that takes minutes to set up and immediately starts delivering value.

Installation and Setup

Start by adding Bugsly to your project:

implementation 'io.bugsly:bugsly-kotlin'

Next, initialize the SDK in your application:

import io.bugsly.Bugsly

fun main() {
    Bugsly.init { options ->
        options.dsn = "YOUR_BUGSLY_DSN"
        options.tracesSampleRate = 1.0
    }
}

How It Works

Once initialized, the Bugsly Kotlin SDK automatically instruments your application. Here's what happens behind the scenes:

• Automatic error capture: Unhandled exceptions and promise rejections are caught and reported with full stack traces
• Context enrichment: Each event includes environment data, request details, and user context where available
• Intelligent grouping: Similar errors are grouped together so you see issues, not individual events
• Performance data: Transaction traces help you understand the performance impact of errors

Customizing Your Integration

For Kotlin projects, we recommend enabling these additional features after the basic setup:

1. Source maps (if applicable) — upload source maps during your build so Bugsly can display readable stack traces
2. User feedback — prompt users who encounter errors for additional context
3. Custom tags — add business-specific metadata to events for filtering and analysis

Bugsly's dashboard will become your team's go-to tool for understanding what's happening in your Kotlin production environment.

Next Steps

With alerting configured, take advantage of Bugsly's alert conditions to fine-tune when you get notified. Set thresholds for error frequency, configure quiet hours for non-critical alerts, and create escalation policies so issues don't fall through the cracks. Integrate with PagerDuty or Opsgenie for on-call rotation support.