Improve production error logging

[ggwadera]

We currently use Sentry to capture errors on the production deployment but it seems it's not doing a very good job because we're mostly clueless whenever a bug happens to show up. I don't know if it's a configuration issue with Sentry or we're just not doing things correctly to send the logs.

Either way, it's worth to take some time to read the docs to better understand this and try to fix, so we can have more reliable logging for bug fixing. Alternatives to Sentry are also welcome if it's reasonable enough to warrant a migration.

Another thing is that logs from dev environments are also being sent, which leads to some confusion when going over the errors on Sentry. Might have to add a condition to only init Sentry when running on production.

c0d3-app/pages/_app.tsx

Lines 20 to 22 in d35f563

	Sentry.init({
	dsn: SENTRY_DSN
	})

So basically, this is what is desired to be improved:

• Disable error reporting outside of production environment
• Fix all the logs that aren't being sent from the production deployment
• Include the serverless function errors logs in the report, or setup a log drain on Vercel

Some useful resources:

• Vercel and Sentry integration https://docs.sentry.io/product/integrations/vercel/
• Sentry guide for Next.js https://docs.sentry.io/platforms/javascript/guides/nextjs/
• Sentry docs https://docs.sentry.io/
• How to store logs on Vercel https://vercel.com/support/articles/how-do-i-store-logs-on-vercel

[tomrule007]

I would like to take a stab at the desired improvements.

• Disable error reporting outside of production environment
  ✓ Created 3 seperate sentry project: vercel-production, vercel-preview & local-dev. Select project by setting NEXT_PUBLIC_SENTRY_DSN & SENTRY_PROJECT environment variables. Vercel variables are already set but must manually add to local setup if you wish to test local logging
• Fix all the logs that aren't being sent from the production deployment
  ✓ Probably still missing some but I believe most error reporting is being sent correctly
• Include the serverless function errors logs in the report, or setup a log drain on Vercel
  ✓ serverless functions are included with a temporary manual hack and log drain is setup with logflare

[ggwadera]

Great, can I assign you to this issue then? Just so we know that there's someone already working on it.

[tomrule007]

Ya put me on this one

[tomrule007]

So the client side error reporting in dev environment is coming from the next.config.js file.

c0d3-app/next.config.js

Lines 20 to 21 in 4e90693

	process.env.SENTRY_DSN ||
	'https://e95626afb0454145b569bc69116f838c@o385150.ingest.sentry.io/5221680',

It seems like a lot of these defaults are maybe stale? and should not be hidden in this config file either way. If the user needs them they should explicitly have to set them in there .env file. We can copy the defaults that should be there to our .env.example file.

Currently that sentry_dna key is pointing to a seperate dev_sandbox project which I think is nice to have for our engineering team to be able to test out sentry functions on there local machine (ie we should keep it and just move it to the private engineering key list)

Something like this:
https://github.com/tomrule007/c0d3-app/pull/1/files

Inspired from: https://12factor.net/config

[ggwadera]

Just as an additional information, adding the environment variables on next.config.js is no longer required for them to work, see the little note at the start here https://nextjs.org/docs/api-reference/next.config.js/environment-variables.

If you want you can remove the sentry values from there when you send a PR for this issue.

[tomrule007]

I've got a working setup for my dev environment that is reporting both frontend and backend errors but I'm still working on getting the config setup that will also work on our vercel host.

It also appears there maybe some issues with the sentry package that will prevent it from working with our serverless setup on vercel.
getsentry/sentry-javascript#3643

[tomrule007]

Issue Status Report

The main issue with the old setup is it only sent backend errors that we manual caught and forwarded with our logger.ts helper middleware utility.

This not only caused a lot of errors to go unnoticed it also seems to not be playing well with the vercel serverless functions and muddies up the stack trace with all the logging function calls.

This new setup uses the @sentry/nextjs package that injects an error catcher first thing into the frontend and the backend to catch all errors when they are created.

Though it still require the withSentry helper function to wrap all our request handlers but should work well with our serverless setup once there issues are handled.

The big bonus of this sentry.io setup is:

• Vercel integration automatically tags each release with a version number that can be tracked to commits and logs when errors first show up.
• Vercel integration uploads the source map files allowing sentry.io to display actual code that caused the error
• Sentry io can also further be integrated with github to link directly to the commits that caused the problem

Test Branch

Created test PR #922 with a live vercel preview branch hosted here:
https://c0d3-app-8ha8m1w94-c0d3.vercel.app/

Test branch includes:

• Throw error button in top left corner that will throw a test frontend error (can be viewed in console.log)
• /api/error route to throw a test backend error ( server will respond with internal error)

Engineering team can login and view the error reports:

• https://sentry.io/organizations/garage-script/projects/garage-script/?project=5217439&statsPeriod=14d
• https://vercel.com/c0d3/c0d3-app/BvLwsukkU6eoxh3Tg7cMXiMsxMec/functions
  * vercel only shows current errors and will not save the function log files

Screenshots for those that don't have login:

Sentry frontend error report

Sentry backend error report

Vercel server function log

Changes

• Replaced the general sentry.io sdk with specific nextjs sdk that handles frontend/backend splitting at compile time. @sentry/browser --> @sentry/nextjs.
• used npx @sentry/wizard -i nextjs to initialize config files sentry.server.config.js / sentry.client.config.js and sentry.properties file which is moved into .env file (and auto handled by vercel integration)
• Also temp disabled coverage report to stop complaints about new mock error throwers (will be removed before merged)

To-Do

• Add separate preview branch environment variable to separate preview logs from production logs
  ✓ Created vercel-preview project on sentry.io and updated vercel preview branch environment variables SENTRY_PROJECT / NEXT_PUBLIC_SENTRY_DSN
• Ensure backend is reporting all errors on serverless (@sentry/nextjs currently has a lot of issues open with serverless not functioning correctly)
  ✓ works with test error and will track this sentry/nextjs issue for any updates
• Remove mock error throwers
• Enable pages coverage reports
• Add withSentry wrapper to all apis (lessons / graphql)
• Change telemetry % gathering to reduce data consumptions and slow downs (or disable, currently logs all transactions and creates a performance report)
  ✓ Leaving at 100%
• Make withSentry wrapper work with our custom LoggedRequest type
  (If Anyone knows how to solve this I would love some help on this one)
  ✓ Removed LoggedRequest from api/lessons as it was unneeded
• Possibly remove current winston-transport-sentry-node * It's using an old sentry package and breaking the apps ability to setup preformance monitoring
  ✓ Removed package and and set winston to just log to console

[ggwadera]

Oh damn that's some awesome stuff. Didn't even know sentry could do all that. Nice work 💪

[tomrule007]

So this issue has snowballed to be much bigger than I initially intended.

Since apollo has its own error handler that catches and process the error you have to make an Apollo Plugin that links into there error event handler. Luckily there was a blog post for this that I was basically able to copy paste.

Blog: https://blog.sentry.io/2020/07/22/handling-graphql-errors-using-sentry
plugin api info: https://www.apollographql.com/docs/apollo-server/integrations/plugins/

But there is also still an issue with Sentry.flush() function that sometimes fails (there are multiple on going active issues on this / serverless hosts not working properly)

Remaining Todo

• Check functionality on staging server
• Add Typescript types for apolloSentryErrorPlugin
• Add Tests for apolloSentryErrorPlugin