To help its customers communicate more effectively, TechSmith assists in the creation of images and videos. Its flagship products, Snagit and Camtasia, are used by more than 30 million customers.

While TechSmith prides itself on providing a superior product to its customers, like all companies, problems sometimes arise.

For example, when an app crashes, customers can submit a report so that TechSmith can investigate. Often these reports don’t provide the best or enough information.

Our Internal Telemetry for TechSmith Products collects crash reports from multiple sources, gathering as much relevant information as possible. It then sends the combined crash report to a database, where an automatic notification is sent to the assigned TechSmith development team.

The tech team can then use an internal web portal to access the detailed crash report and associated information from each active product, together with access to a direct download of the report file. This, in turn, makes the diagnostic and repair process more streamlined, more efficient, and more to the customer’s satisfaction, as well as resulting in long-range improvements to a product.

Our Internal Telemetry for TechSmith Products is written in C#/C++ and incorporated into Snagit and Camtasia as a dll file. The web portal uses ASP.NET Core and is hosted on Microsoft Azure. The crash report data is stored in an SQL database in Azure. Two prototype applications, modeled after Snagit and Camtasia, are used to demonstrate the working Internal Telemetry.