Forge logs sharing is now enabled during app installations

[AngelinaIgnatova]

Hi everyone,

Late last year, we shipped continuous access to Forge app logs. As a result, Forge app developers were able to ask users to enable log sharing, and then access those logs via the developer console, in order to troubleshoot issues with the app.

Since its release, we’ve learned a number of things from your feedback:

Firstly, the process of enabling logs can be time-intensive for both you and your users, and users often require your assistance and guidance to share logs.

Secondly, those of you with free Forge apps don’t have access to user contact details through the Marketplace reports, and therefore can’t contact users to request log sharing to troubleshoot. Despite having access to metrics, some of you struggled to find the root cause of an issue without being able to view the logs.

Thirdly, you are often unable to match a spike in the errors with the corresponding log messages.

We are happy to announce that, starting from today, log sharing will be enabled during Forge app installations. When a user installs your app, they will see additional information advising them that by proceeding with the installation, their log data will be shared with you, the app developer. Note that users can still choose to disable log access once the installation is complete.

We believe that this change will increase the percentage of users who share logs, therefore increasing the amount of log data you have access to, and making it easier and faster for you to troubleshoot issues your users are experiencing with your app.

Existing installations

This change affects new Forge app installations only - there will be no change to the log sharing status for existing installations. This is to ensure that users who have taken into consideration the ability to control access to the app logs can continue to use their apps without any disruption.

What’s next?

As this change is rolled out, you will start seeing an increased volume of data coming through the Logs screen In the developer console. As such, we want to identify and make improvements to this screen. For example, the team will be looking to increase the number of invocations that can be loaded on the page.

We want your feedback!

As always, we’re interested in any feedback you have. Please feel free to share your thoughts by commenting on this post, or by sending me a DM.

Kind regards,

Angelina Ignatova

[RhysDiab]

@AngelinaIgnatova Thank you!

This will make it much easier to debug issues!

[EduardoOliveira]

Awesome, thanks for sharing!

[ajay]

@AngelinaIgnatova

This would make debugging easier.
One more thing I want to point out is the occasional unknown error observed in the logs. I am sure its not an application error but more to do with lambda invocation. Any guidelines on how do we go about debugging system side issues?

RequestId: ffb8b96d-bce0-45bf-b511-8c0c071619da Error: Runtime exited without providing a reason
Runtime.ExitError

[EkinBukulmez]

Hello @ajay hope you’re doing great and thank you so much for your feedback! Regarding the log message you have encountered, this is visible as a part of our effort to surface more errors in app logs for a better debugging experience. This particular message is an unexpected platform error that could have been caused by an app invocation hitting the runtime memory limit, time limit or other factors that we are currently investigating. As this particular log message potentially indicates an Out of Memory error, or a Timeout error, we would suggest looking into whether there are any operations in your app that are potentially running for too long.
We are continuously improving the way we classify these errors so that they may be valuable when debugging app errors. Overtime, you should be seeing more precise and readable log messages on the Developer Console. We are also planning on making an announcement on the Developer Community Forum once we have identified and surfaced more errors as a part of app logs. In the meantime, let us know if you have any further feedback or questions. Thank you!

[ajay]

@EkinBukulmez

and thank you so much for your feedback! Regarding the log message you have encountered, this is visible as a part of our effort to surface more errors in app logs for a better debugging experience. This particular message is an unexpected platform error that could have been caused by an app invocation hitting the runtime memory limit, time limit or other factors that we are currently investigating. As this particular log message potentially indicates an Out of Memory error, or a Timeout error, we would suggest looking into whether there are any operations in your app that are potentially running for too long.
We are continuously improving the way we classify these errors so that they may be valuable when

Thanks, @EkinBukulmez, for the detailed response. I will check out the Out of Memory error, or a Timeout error possibility with the App implementation… Also, it would be good if we could have some tooling around these types of errors especially using the Forge tunnel … this would help Forge developers to quickly checkout memory issues before the actual deployment to production…

[EkinBukulmez]

Thank you @ajay, we would be happy to assist you in debugging these errors further if needed. Regarding tooling around these errors using Forge tunnel, we understand these errors are currently difficult to test or detect during development, as they are caused by platform limits and not app code. We will relay this feedback to the appropriate team so that these errors can be easily discovered during development. In the meantime, let us know if you have any further feedback or questions. Thank you again for your feedback!