Exception Monitoring and Triage for Remediation

Turn application errors into actionable insights. Rietta’s exception monitoring and triage services help you cut through the noise, identify security vulnerabilities, and accelerate remediation efforts.

For decades, Rietta has provided exception monitoring services for our clients utilizing systems such as Rollbar and Sentry.io, and other tools that have come and gone from popularity. Exceptions logs are a critical element of an effective Logging and Monitoring program per the OWASP Top 10 recommendations. And it is a service that we have used to both detect attempted intrusions and provide fast, efficient, code changes that improved and blocked that malicious activity.

Our Process

Our experienced team analyzes exception logs, leveraging their deep understanding of the application’s language and platform to differentiate between critical threats, user experience issues, and benign noise. We then provide prioritized recommendations for triage and remediation.

Based on the findings and our contracted role, we will either:

• If determine is background noise:
  • mark the exception as closed
  • if it recurs more than a few times, recommend code changes to reduce noise
• If determined to be a bug:
  • Open an Issue (or Ticket) on the development project management board explaining
  • Develop automated test that exercise the failure condition
  • Develop code changes to fix the issue
• If determined to be a security incident:
  • Will document the finding and raise the matter via the appropriate security process established with the client

What are Exceptions?

Application exceptions are generally reported when an HTTP Status 500, a hard error resulting in a broken page, is returned due to a low-level application error. Depending on the environment and monitoring setup, other errors such as HTTP Status 404 (Not Found) and other lesser errors might also be reported as exceptions.

Are all exceptions threats?

No. An exception is an error state that may either represent poor user experience or at times malicious activity. At other times it is just background noise without any specific action being required though reducing alert volume is helpful to avoid missing real threats. Automated scanning tools and AI can help prioritize, but there is is significant benefit getting the eyes of an expert in the language and platform your application is running to take a look.

Are exceptions the same as CVE?

No, generally a CVE is a known vulnerability that impacts the software supply chain of your application. An exception is an actual error condition triggered in real life. This can be a previously unknown bug, unexpected user input that causes compatibility issues, or at times evidence of a cyber security incident that needs to be addressed.

Rietta also provides CVE monitoring and patch development as part of our vulnerability management and remediation solutions.