[pserwylo]

The last two places I've worked I added a custom "debug bar" of sorts. We typically use in dev and lower QA environments, and they quickly become indespensible to help answer questions like "which version of service X is deployed", something that may be easy for a dev to answer as they can look at what is deployed on the server, but harder for a tester who can only access the frontend.

Other useful environmental information we find useful includes "which DB is being used", which OpenShift namespace (with a link to the console), traceability for the deployed artifact (e.g. links to the GitHub release tag, CI pipeline which built the artifact, docker registry with the correctly tagged image). Especially useful if you have downstream or upstream services, is to have colour coded status info about whether the services are up.

For the few days investment getting this up and running, it pays itself back in terms of time gained answering questions such as "Why doesn't this feature work? Oh, after investigation, this service was down during testing".

[thejosh]

Also handy (regardless of framework, language, etc) is if you use feature flags, if you're using actual valid credentials against a service or a local testing service (eg S3 vs minio, etc).

Enabling this for non-technical users really helped also report any issues they would see, it was great for testing environments.

Plus you would probably end up needing all this information anyway if you do any error tracking, so it probably exists somewhere already :-).