Observability en

Observability

masterror treats telemetry as part of the error lifecycle. Each AppError tracks a dirty flag; telemetry is emitted once per state change — at construction, after mutation, or when the error crosses a transport boundary (Axum IntoResponse, Actix error_response(), tonic Status conversion). You rarely call anything manually.

Feature flags

Feature	Adds
tracing	Structured tracing event per error, trace_id via log-mdc
metrics	error_total{code,category} counter via the metrics crate
backtrace	Lazy std::backtrace::Backtrace capture gated by RUST_BACKTRACE
colored	ANSI-colored terminal styling with TTY detection

[dependencies]
masterror = { version = "0.28", features = ["tracing", "metrics", "backtrace"] }

Tracing

With tracing enabled, each error emits one ERROR-level event with target masterror::error:

Field	Content
code	AppCode string, e.g. NOT_FOUND
category	AppErrorKind label, e.g. Database
message	Public message, if any
retry_seconds	Retry advice, if set
redactable	Whether the message is redacted at transport boundaries
metadata_len	Number of attached metadata fields
www_authenticate	Authentication challenge, if set
trace_id	Pulled from the log-mdc context key trace_id, if present

The emission is subscriber-aware: if no subscriber is interested in ERROR-level events for the target, the event stays pending and is retried on the next flush, so nothing is lost when a subscriber is installed late.

To correlate errors with requests, store a trace ID in the MDC in your request middleware:

log_mdc::insert("trace_id", request_id);

Every error constructed while the key is set carries it in the event.

Metrics

With metrics enabled, each newly-dirty error increments:

error_total{code="NOT_FOUND", category="NotFound"}

Both labels are stable strings (AppCode::as_str() and the AppErrorKind label), so dashboards and alerts survive refactors of your domain types. Wire any metrics recorder (Prometheus, StatsD, ...) as usual; masterror only uses metrics::counter!.

Backtraces

With backtrace enabled, a Backtrace snapshot is captured lazily when telemetry is flushed — not on every construction. Capture is controlled by RUST_BACKTRACE: unset, empty, 0, off and false disable it; anything else enables it. The preference is read once and cached per process.

# #[cfg(feature = "backtrace")] {
use masterror::AppError;

let err = AppError::internal("db down");
if let Some(bt) = err.backtrace() {
    eprintln!("{bt}");
}
# }

You can also attach a pre-captured trace with AppError::with_backtrace(backtrace), which takes priority over lazy capture.

Manual flushing with .log()

Constructors and conversions emit telemetry automatically. After mutating an error (adding fields, changing retry advice) you can force re-emission:

use masterror::{AppError, field};

let err = AppError::service("upstream degraded")
    .with_field(field::str("upstream", "billing"));
err.log();

log() is idempotent per state: if nothing changed since the last emission, it does nothing. The HTTP/gRPC adapters flush the same way at the boundary, so an error that is constructed, enriched and then returned from an Axum handler emits once per state — once at construction and once at the boundary for the enriched state — never twice for the same state.

Inspecting the chain

Independent of features, AppError exposes the tools log pipelines need:

# #[cfg(feature = "std")] {
use std::io::Error as IoError;
use masterror::AppError;

let err = AppError::internal("db down").with_context(IoError::other("disk offline"));

assert_eq!(err.chain().count(), 2);
let _root = err.root_cause();
assert!(err.metadata().is_empty());
# }

metadata().iter_with_redaction() yields (key, value, policy) triples so a logging layer can honour field redaction — see Context & Metadata.

Colored terminal output

The colored feature adds masterror::colored::style for CLI tools. Colors are applied only when stderr is a TTY, NO_COLOR is unset, TERM is not dumb and the terminal supports ANSI; otherwise the text passes through unchanged. Detection is cached per process.

Function	Style	Use for
error_kind_critical	red	critical failure kinds
error_kind_warning	yellow	recoverable/warning kinds
error_code	cyan	machine codes
error_message	bright white	main message
source_context	dimmed	secondary/source info
metadata_key	green	structured field names

# #[cfg(feature = "colored")] {
use masterror::colored::style;

eprintln!(
    "{}: {}",
    style::error_code("ERR_DB_001"),
    style::error_message("Database connection failed")
);
# }

See the runnable demo in examples/colored_cli.rs.

See also: Feature Flags · Context & Metadata · Web Frameworks · Best Practices