iristyle/nlog.airbrake

A custom NLog target that will push errors to AirBrake or Errbit

NLog.AirBrake

An NLog target that sends exception information to AirBrake API compatible listeners This includes the hosted AirBrake service as well as Errbit, the open-source Ruby alternative.

If you have the means to do so, please give AirBrake your money and use their service!

We are using client code from SharpBrake to handle communication with AirBrake.

Installation

Use the Nuget package manager to install NLog.AirBrake

Configuration

You need to configure two things for this to work: NLog and AirBrake

NLog Configuration

Your NLog.config should look something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<nlog xmlns="http://www.nlog-project.org/schemas/NLog.xsd"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">

  <extensions>
    <!-- Add the assembly -->
    <add assembly="NLog.AirBrake" />
  </extensions>
  <targets>
    <!-- Set up the target -->
    <target xsi:type="AirBrake" name="airBrakeTarget" />
  </targets>
  <rules>
    <!-- Set up the logger. -->
    <logger name="*" minlevel="Trace" writeTo="airBrakeTarget" />
  </rules>
</nlog>

AirBrake Configuration

Your app.config file should look something like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
	<appSettings>
		<add key="Airbrake.ApiKey" value="[API_Key]" />
		<add key="Airbrake.Environment" value="[Environment]" />
		<add key="Airbrake.ServerUri" value="[ServerApiUri]" />
	</appSettings>
</configuration>

The values in the above that should be replaced are

• [API_Key] - Self-explanatory
• [Environment] - The name of the server environment in which the error occurred, such as 'staging' or 'production'.
• [ServerApiUri] - The URI of the AirBrake API. For example:
  • http://api.airbrake.io/notifier_api/v2/notices (AirBrake)
  • http://yourservername/notifier_api/v2/notices (Self-hosted ErrBit)

Securing configuration information

Its recommended that whenever credentials are stored in config, that they be encrypted. That is beyond the scope of this README, but some information can be found here

Release Notes

0.6

• Updated NLog versions from 2.0.0.2000 to 2.0.1.2

0.5

• Added support for using target without exceptions

0.2 - .NET 3.5

• Retargeted at .NET 3.5
• Added missing NLog and NLog.config packages to nuspec as dependencies

0.1 - Initial release

• It works!

Credits

• Thanks to AirBrake for standardizing a simple error notifications API, that others could leverage.
• Thanks to SharpBrake for making their code open source in a friendly MIT license that allows us to easily pull into our code. You guys are good open source citizens!
• Thanks to NLog for the best open source logging framework for .NET
• Thanks to Errbit for a great free piece of software to self-host for cheapskates ;0
• The icon was derived from the published AirBrake and NLog logos - hopefully it falls under derivative works licensing.

Contributions

If you see something wrong, feel free to submit a pull request. Coding guidelines are :

• Indent with 2 spaces
• 80 character lines
• Make sure the tests pass

nlog.airbrake's Issues

compiler warnings in .net 4.0

When you reference the 2.0 version of this assembly in a 4.0 project, you get a compiler warning:

Warning 1 The predefined type 'System.Runtime.CompilerServices.ExtensionAttribute' is defined in multiple assemblies in the global alias; using definition from 'd:\ScratchProjects\ConsoleApplication1\packages\NLog.AirBrake.0.4.1211.1918\lib\net40\NLog.AirBrake.dll' d:\ScratchProjects\ConsoleApplication1\CSC ConsoleApplication1

This is because of the empty ExtensionAttribute class used to make the extension methods work.

Even if we convert all the extension method calls to static method calls, the nlog assembly compiled against .net 2.0 has the same class defined. I think we may need to have 2 separate builds - one for 2.0 and one for 4.0.

Write unit tests for target

Take a look here for an example
https://github.com/haf/NLog.RabbitMQ/tree/master/src/NLog.Targets.RabbitMQ.Tests

Concatenate inner exception messages

We should recursively concatenate inner exception messages to get the full exception message to log, similar to the way that Exception.ToString() works.

Read settings from environment variables

Should use environment variables if available before checking web / app .config

• AIRBRAKE_API_KEY
• AIRBRAKE_ENVIRONMENT
• AIRBRAKE_SERVER_URI

Exception stack trace does not include inner exception data

I just noticed that the exception stack trace (back trace) only includes the data from the top most exception.

Should we include the stack trace of the inner exceptions as well?

Incorrect Line numbers

Airbrake is regularly reporting incorrect line numbers, requiring us to look elsewhere (e.g. DB logs) to find the actual log number if we wish to get any use from the service.

The line numbers in the other Nlog sources are always correct, so the issue seems to be somewhere between the error occuring and the Airbrake service.

Further investigation points towarks a possible issue with the current version of sharp brake which is in use - see airbrake/sharpbrake#29

Investigate if we can use Client Profile framework

Build with TravisCI

See libgit2sharp for example of howto on Mono

https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2sharp/blob/vNext/.travis.yml

Nlog.Config dependency

I'm not so sure that nlog.config should be listed as a dependency. Thoughts?

AirBrake doesn't send Error()'s, only ErrorException()'s

Currently if you set a logger rule for "Error" as exampled below, and you use nLog.Error() instead of nLog.ErrorException(), Airbrake will not send an error report.

logger name="*" minlevel="Error" writeTo="airBrakeTarget"

Can we change this to allow either method to send the error?

Edit: Formatting