In our Heroku apps we saw that developers tend to overlook some Heroku errors. Since we're using sentry for error reporting, we had the idea of writing a small service that creates sentry issues for each error.
We now open the codebase up, with the goal to evolve this service into something that is useful for more companies.
Heroku supports HTTPS log drains. On each of your Heroku application you can configure a new log drain pointing to this log-reporter service. This leads to us getting all log messages.
The service then parses the logs for specific errors and generates a sentry report out of it.
So the sentry error grouping works we try to replace some patterns in the path which we think represent identifiers.
Currently we parse & report:
Deployment works via heroku.yml
and the linked Dockerfile
.
We're currently running the service on one small dyno, and it's handling around 3k RPM without any issues.
Configuration can be set using environment variables, more details in the
config
module.
PORT
(mandatory): normally set by Heroku, the port the webserver runs onSENTRY_DSN
(optional): the sentry DSN where the service should send its own errors to. The sentry client library additional reads some other environment variables likeSENTRY_ENVIRONMENT
.SENTRY_DEBUG
(optional): activates sentry debug logging
You need to add this service as a log-drain to each sender-service:
$ heroku drains:add https://xxx-log-reporter.herokuapp.com/
...
$ heroku drains
[this will print the _drain token_ you need]
Then you can add any mapping as a new environment variable SENTRY_MAPPING_XXX
where XXX
can be replaced with any service name.
The value for this mapping contains of 3 pieces, separated by |
:
- the logplex token from above
- the destination sentry environment name
- the destination sentry dsn
Example value:
d.xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx|production|https://xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@sentry.io/9999999
This service is running in production at thermondo, but has some pending improvements, and also contains some internal thermondo specifics around the replacement patterns in paths.
You can use the service at your own risk, if these specifics are fine with you.