# How to use error logs to troubleshoot a user issue?
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-use-error-logs-to-troubleshoot-a-user-issue/162490
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [August 30, 2020, 7:46pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-use-error-logs-to-troubleshoot-a-user-issue/162490 "2020-08-30T19:46:24Z")
**Posts on this page:** 7
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@anon23840344](https://meta.discourse.org/u/anon23840344)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2020, 7:46pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-use-error-logs-to-troubleshoot-a-user-issue/162490/1 "2020-08-30T19:46:24Z")
A user of my Discourse in Belgium complains our site responds too slowly to clicks. I’m in California. I’ve not gotten any complaint from my other users, who so far are in Minnesota, Germany, and the Netherlands. The user in question tells me she uses Chrome on Windows. Her download and upload speeds test similarly to mine via [speedof.me](http://speedof.me).
If I visit https://discourse.MY\_DOMAIN.com/logs/, I see the latest entry is time-stamped just a few minutes before her email was sent. Its “info” tab reads:
```plaintext
Uncaught [object Object]
Url: https://discourse.MY_DOMAIN.com/assets/ember_jquery-1ed3f3559e6f967733b4088aa729ff7039dff2c09c5a5f787a214b016f58aabc.js
Line: 1
Column: 268124
Window Location: https://discourse.MY_DOMAIN.com/
```
Its “backtrace” tab is empty. Its “env” tab reads:
```plaintext
hostname MY_APP-app
process_id 780
application_version ab0b0344048e7e7354615286486bf0508c7c2df6
HTTP_HOST discourse.MY_DOMAIN.com
REQUEST_URI /logs/report_js_error
REQUEST_METHOD POST
HTTP_USER_AGENT Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/84.0.4147.135 Safari/537.36
HTTP_ACCEPT */*
HTTP_REFERER https://discourse.MY_DOMAIN.com/
HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR IP_ADDRESS_IN_BELGIUM
HTTP_X_REAL_IP IP_ADDRESS_IN_BELGIUM
time 4:25 am
params
message Uncaught [object Object]
url https://discourse.MY_DOMAIN.com/assets/ember_jquery-1ed3f3559e6f967733b4088aa729ff7039dff2c09c5a5f78
line 1
column 268124
window_location https://discourse.MY_DOMAIN.com/
```
How can I use this information, or what else should I do, to troubleshoot her concern?
Thank you.
---
### Author:  [@Stephen](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Stephen)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2020, 9:56pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-use-error-logs-to-troubleshoot-a-user-issue/162490/2 "2020-08-30T21:56:43Z")
> [@anon23840344](#):
>
> our site responds too slowly to clicks.
If it’s a single user, then it’s likely either a local client issue, or network-related.
- Where is your site hosted?
- Are you using CloudFlare?
- Have you confirmed whether she is using a VPN or anything which affects her route to your server? A traceroute can help here.
---
### Author:  [@anon23840344](https://meta.discourse.org/u/anon23840344)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2020, 10:18pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-use-error-logs-to-troubleshoot-a-user-issue/162490/3 "2020-08-30T22:18:57Z")
Thanks for your reply.
- Site is hosted on AWS, not CloudFlare.
- User is very tech un-savvy, so I doubt she’s on VPN, but I could ask. I asked her to log in to [safe mode](https://meta.discourse.org/t/53504?silent=true) and report if that improves anything, but she’s yet to reply to that (it is late in Europe now).
- Can you recommend/link a traceroute for Discourse?
---
### Author:  [@Stephen](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Stephen)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2020, 10:21pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-use-error-logs-to-troubleshoot-a-user-issue/162490/4 "2020-08-30T22:21:44Z")
> [@anon23840344](#):
>
> Can you recommend/link a traceroute for Discourse?
Traceroute is a command line tool, present on mac (`traceroute`) and Windows (`tracert`). It will show you the network route from their computer to your server, hop by hop. I’m not aware of any good browser-based alternatives, most will show the route from the server rather than the client.
You could ask for a browser screenshot to see if there are any funky extensions installed too.
Have you ruled out local security software? I’ve occasionally seen antivirus browser extensions which proxy traffic and can cause issues.
---
### Author:  [@anon23840344](https://meta.discourse.org/u/anon23840344)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2020, 10:49pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-use-error-logs-to-troubleshoot-a-user-issue/162490/5 "2020-08-30T22:49:41Z")
Ah. So, I can SSH into our Discourse machine, I can see that `traceroute` isn’t installed, I can run `apt install traceroute` (installs version 2.1.0), and then I can run `traceroute HER_APPARENT_IP_ADDRESS_FROM_DISCOURSE LOGS`?
If I do, it outputs the following.
```plaintext
traceroute to 84.196.9.6 (84.196.9.6), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 * * *
2 10.70.134.15 (10.70.134.15) 1.101 ms 10.70.134.35 (10.70.134.35) 1.079 ms 10.70.134.27 (10.70.134.27) 0.988 ms
3 138.197.251.92 (138.197.251.92) 1.323 ms 138.197.251.94 (138.197.251.94) 1.628 ms 138.197.251.124 (138.197.251.124) 1.206 ms
4 138.197.251.110 (138.197.251.110) 1.079 ms 1.071 ms 138.197.251.114 (138.197.251.114) 1.056 ms
5 138.197.244.17 (138.197.244.17) 1.247 ms 1.251 ms 138.197.244.19 (138.197.244.19) 1.112 ms
6 nyk-b3-link.telia.net (62.115.45.5) 1.866 ms 1.383 ms nyk-b3-link.telia.net (62.115.45.9) 1.331 ms
7 * * *
8 ldn-bb3-link.telia.net (62.115.113.21) 82.665 ms 82.486 ms 82.459 ms
9 adm-bb4-link.telia.net (62.115.134.26) 78.418 ms adm-bb3-link.telia.net (62.115.113.210) 82.951 ms 83.025 ms
10 brx-b3-link.telia.net (62.115.116.191) 82.894 ms brx-b4-link.telia.net (62.115.116.231) 78.732 ms 78.321 ms
11 be-dgb01a-rb1-ae-20-0.aorta.net (213.46.162.13) 82.955 ms 82.970 ms be-zav01a-rb1-ae-21-0.aorta.net (213.46.162.6) 87.143 ms
12 * * *
13 * * *
14 * * *
15 * d54C40906.access.telenet.be (84.196.9.6) 94.362 ms 93.255 ms
```
The longest hop is the last one, 94 milliseconds, which seems reasonable. Would this indicate the route from our Discourse machine in Northern California to her computer in Belgium looks like it should be just fine? Was the Discourse log in my original post above otherwise devoid of any valuable information other than getting her apparent IP address?
---
### Author:  [@Stephen](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Stephen)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2020, 10:58pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-use-error-logs-to-troubleshoot-a-user-issue/162490/6 "2020-08-30T22:58:43Z")
You would need her to traceroute to you, the route she takes out from her ISP isn’t necessarily the same route your server will take to her network.
Is the issue recent? There was a big [Level3/CenturyLink outage today](https://blog.cloudflare.com/analysis-of-todays-centurylink-level-3-outage/) which definitely impacted certain transatlantic routes.
---
### Author:  [@anon23840344](https://meta.discourse.org/u/anon23840344)
#### Post date: [August 31, 2020, 11:27pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-use-error-logs-to-troubleshoot-a-user-issue/162490/7 "2020-08-31T23:27:14Z")
Thanks for your continued replies.
My user overnight reported that logging in via Discourse [safe mode](https://meta.discourse.org/t/53504?silent=true) solved her problem. I’ve now asked her if she can help narrow which of the three [Safe Mode](https://meta.discourse.org/t/53504?silent=true) checkboxes actually helps.
My challenges continue to be our time-zone difference, our language difference, and our difference in comfort with technology. I can update this thread if/when I learn more.
Thanks also for the relevant news article. This was her first time using our Discourse, so now I also wonder if that outage could be relevant.