Throw errors instead of logging to stdout

Snippet from my nodejs log:

2018-02-07 11:07:23 - info: Config loaded: 'marketbot.ini'
Elastic APM isn't correctly configured: Missing serviceName
2018-02-07 11:07:23 - info: Elastic APM enabled, logging to 'http://localhost:8200'
2018-02-07 11:07:23 - info: Starting bot activation

Elastic APM is started with this:

elastic.start({
  appName: 'marketbot',
  secretToken: configuration.getProperty('elastic.token'),
  serverUrl: configuration.getProperty('elastic.url')
});

If Elastic APM cannot start because of some reason (for example an error in configuration), I expect to get an error. Instead the module logs directly to stdout, bypassing my custom logger.

I’d like Elastic APM to throw errors instead of logging to stdout, this way I can choose to react to the error, do nothing or let the application crash.

The same behaviour happens when calling transaction.end();. If the request fails then I expect an error here as well.

Instead of this output:

Error: connect ECONNREFUSED 127.0.0.1:8200
    at Object._errnoException (util.js:1003:13)
    at _exceptionWithHostPort (util.js:1024:20)
    at TCPConnectWrap.afterConnect [as oncomplete] (net.js:1195:14)

[astorm]

Coming back to this a few years later, it looks like our customer logger was fixed, so that aspect of this issue is completed.

Re:

I’d like Elastic APM to throw errors instead of logging to stdout, this way I can choose to react to the error, do nothing or let the application crash.

Speaking broadly the agent goes out of its way not to throw an exception that might not be caught. We do this out of an abundance of caution for not crashing the application under instrumentation.

Closing this out for now, but we’re always happy to revisit here in old 2020.

[watson]

@dicarlo2 Thanks for raising this. I’ve created an issue on it: #289