Failurous

Failurous is an open source webapp for monitoring exceptions in your live applications.

Installation

Server

Clients

Rails 3

To use Failurous from Rails 3 application, add this to your Gemfile:

gem 'failurous-rails', :git => 'git://github.com/railsrumble/rr10-team-256.git'

Next you need to add the following under config/initializer/failurous.rb:

require 'failurous'

Failurous::Config.server_address = '<FAILUROUS-INSTALLATION>'
Failurous::Config.api_key = '<API-KEY-FOR-PROJECT>'

Rails.application.config.middleware.use Failurous::FailMiddleware

The middleware will automatically catch any exceptions your app raises and deliver them to the Failurous service for later viewing.

Java

To integrate Failurous to a Java webapp, first add the Failurous Maven repository to your Maven POM:

<repository>
  <id>failurous</id>
  <url>http://failurous.r10.railsrumble.com/mvnrepo</url>
  <snapshots>
    <enabled>true</enabled>
  </snapshots>
  <releases>
    <enabled>true</enabled>
  </releases>
</repository>

Next, add a dependency to the Failurous Java client:

<dependency>
  <groupId>failurous</groupId>
  <artifactId>javaclient</artifactId>
  <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>

Finally, configure the Failurous Java client to intercept exceptions by adding it as a servlet filter to your web.xml:

<filter>
    <filter-name>failurous</filter-name>
    <filter-class>failurous.ClientFilter</filter-class>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>serverAddress</param-name>
        <param-value><FAILUROUS-INSTALLATION></param-value>
    </init-param>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>apiKey</param-name>
        <param-value><API-KEY-FOR-PROJECT></param-value>
    </init-param>
</filter>

<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>failurous</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

The filter will automatically catch any exceptions your app threw and deliver them to the Failurous service for later viewing.

Notice that the position of the filter-mapping element affects which exceptions Failurous will report. Any filter mappings appearing before the failurous filter mapping in web.xml will not be reported, since they are executed outside its scope.

Sending fails

Often there's cases where it'd be desirable to be able to send debugging information or notifications of "failurous" behaviour in your application. For example, when someone tries to access protected content without proper access rights.

Failurous comes in handy here, because it's not limited to only exceptions: you can actually send any data you like.

In Rails applications

To send your custom fails to Failurous, you can use the Failurous::FailNotification to build your fail and send it. The syntax is as follows:

Failurous::FailNotification.set_title('Title for your fail').
  add_field(:section_name, :field_name, {:use_in_checksum => true | false}).
  add_field(:another, :field, {...}).
  send

License

See LICENSE