Provide a means for capturing stack trace for messages that are not errors

… without relying on the logging integration.

SDK v0.7.10

Currently, the only way to do this is via the logging integration and issuing a log at the configured level or higher with exc_info=True. I don’t think this is a good substitute because:

• I don’t want to classify these events as errors (the end goal being errors should drive alerts)
• Sometimes there are interesting or unexpected events that I want to debug more and leveraging Sentry’s stack traces with locals helps in this regard
• I don’t want to lower our logging integration level to warning or similar, as that may spam our project with a lot of warnings/events that are not interesting or useful

Ideally, the Sentry SDK could add an additional argument to the and capture_message APIs to make this simple from a user perspective:

sentry_sdk.capture_message("Unexpected event", level="warning", stack_trace=True)

I’m trying to get this working locally with the SDK, and it’s leading to incomplete event data (see picture) and also leading to pretty hairy code.

sentry_sdk.capture_event({"message": "oops 2", "level": "warning", "threads": [{"stacktrace": sentry_sdk.utils.current_stacktrace(with_locals=True), "crashed": False, "current": True}])

This was more or less copied from the code I see for adding stack traces in Client._prepare_event.

[untitaker]

As it stands you’re the first one I know who both has a usecase like this and is sufficiently dissatisfied with the UX around it to want additional API surface. So you have to understand that this is not something we want to change right now, especially considering that this thread contains multiple workarounds that are not even fragile or rely on unstable API, instead they are just verbose.

The simplest suggestion with before_send, that I think I didn’t elaborate enough on, would look like this (untested):

import logging, sys

from sentry_sdk.integrations.logging import LoggingIntegration
from sentry_sdk import *

def before_send(event, hint):
    if event.get('level') not in ('debug', 'info', 'warning') or event['extra'].get('sentry_force_send_event'):
        return event

init(DSN, integrations=[LoggingIntegration(event_level=logging.WARN)], before_send=before_send)

#sys.exc_clear()
logging.warn("Hi! I am an event", sentry_force_send_event=True, exc_info=True)

Admittedly I don’t really understand whether you can’t or don’t want to use the logging integration to do this. It seems to me like the above would work perfectly fine regardless of whether you use structlog besides it.

[blueyed]

It would be useful if you could override this on single calls though. The use case I have is to have it enabled by default, because it provides more info (with logging in particular), but would like to avoid it with a custom sentry_sdk.capture_message("Initialized Sentry") (where/when logging is not configured yet, but also there it would not be possible to turn it off for a particular logging message anyway).