Manually send warnings / soft-exceptions

[Timmitry]

I have some places in my application where exceptions can happen, and are handled - for example, a job fails due to unavailability of an external service. It will automatically be retried, and if some other attempt succeeds, there is nothing I need to do.

However, I would still like to be notified when those retries happen, so that I can see if it happens once a week or 50 times a day.

When I was using Sentry, I would use capture_message for this, where I could just write a string like "E-Mail delivery has been retried" and add some tags.

With Appsignal, I only found report_error, which expects an exception. Is there a way to send a message, or do you have ideas on how to better handle situations like these?

[tombruijn]

Hi @Timmitry, you say this happens in a background job. Would you happen to be using Sidekiq? If so, you can use our sidekiq_report_errors option and set it to discard for this behavior.

If not, what library are you using?

[Timmitry]

I am using GoodJob, so unfortunately, this is not an option. It is not only about background jobs, but about reporting in general - like for example the default case in a case-statement, where I could add like Appsignal.report_warning "This branch should never be reached", etc... Just like an assertion about my code which I can validate this way.

[unflxw]

Hi @Timmitry, there are several features within AppSignal that might allow you to track these events. While we don't provide an equivalent to report_error that takes a string, you could create a helper that raises a custom error type and calls report_error with it.

However, what I'd suggest is using our logging feature. With logging, you can log these messages through your application's logger. Then you can create views that display those messages, or configure alerts based on the frequency of those messages.