ERROR-MONITORING.md

Error Monitoring

If you're setting up Plio for staging or production, you may also wish to capture errors faced by users in real-time. For that purpose, Plio uses Sentry.io for real-time error monitoring and reporting.

Pre-requisites

1. Create an account at Sentry.
2. Set up your organization.
3. Create a new Django project. Name it plio-backend.

Enable error logging

1. Set up env variable for SENTRY_DSN. You can get the value of DSN for your projects from Project Settings > SDK Setup > Client Keys (DSN)
2. Make sure your APP_ENV is either 'staging' or 'production'.
3. Test your set up by triggering an error - add the following line in your urls.py file:

   from django.urls import path
   def trigger_error(request):
       division_by_zero = 1 / 0
   
   urlpatterns = [
       path('trigger-error/', trigger_error),
       # other paths
   ]

4. You should now see the error at your Sentry dashboard as well from the Issues tab.

Enable reporting

By default, Sentry sends error reports to your inbox. However, you may prefer other channels to receive error notifications.

At Plio, we use Discord to receive real-time alerts using Sentry Webhooks. If you're also using Discord, or a different tool that supports webhooks, follow the steps below to start receiving alerts:

1. Create a new channel at Discord where you want to receive the alerts. Then, enable the webhook and copy the webhook url. Channel settings > Integrations > Webhook
2. Create a SentryDiscord webhook.
   1. Visit this page at SentryDiscord.dev.
   2. Paste the Discord webhook that you copied in the first step.
   3. Click on create.
   4. You will receive a new webhook. Copy and store it somewhere. We'll use it later.
3. Go to Integrations for your organization from Settings > Integrations
4. Search for Webhooks and click on Add to project.
5. Select your project.
6. Enter the SentryDiscord webhook url from step 2 inside the Callback URLs textbox.
7. Click Save changes.
8. Click Enable Plugin.
9. Next, go to Alerts. By default you may see an alert named Send a notification for new issues. If yes, you can skip the create alert step below and got to edit existing alert.
10. Create a new Alert
    1. Click on Create Alert Rule.
    2. In the select alert section, select Issues inside the Errors heading.
    3. Click on Set Conditions.
    4. Environment to be "All Environments".
    5. Set the Alert name to "Send a notification for new issues"
    6. Move to Set Conditions section.
    7. For WHEN, select "A new issue is created".
    8. For IF, leave it as default (no filters).
    9. For THEN, add two options.
       1. Send a notification and select Issue Owners .
       2. Send a notification via an integration and select WebHooks.
    10. Set action interval as per your needs.
11. Edit existing alert - use this if you want to edit existing alert
    1. Move to Set Conditions section.
    2. For THEN, make sure you have the Send a notification via an integration option configured with WebHooks.
12. All set. Trigger an error in your app and you should see the error coming to your Discord channel!