logger.error doesn't show in the "Health" tab anymore

[larssn]

[REQUIRED] Environment info

Not sure if this is the right place to post this in the myriad of issue trackers. Sorry in advance.

firebase-tools:
9.16.3

Platform:
Node 14

[REQUIRED] Test case

Doing a logger.error('Something') no longer shows up in the health tab in the firebase console under Functions->Health.

[REQUIRED] Steps to reproduce

import { logger } from 'firebase-functions';
logger.error('Something')
Notice that it doesn't show up in the health tab anymore

[REQUIRED] Expected behavior

That it shows up there - we need to log handled errors to the health tab.

[REQUIRED] Actual behavior

It never shows up

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[taeold]

Thanks for reporting the issue @larssn.

I'm not familiar with how error reporting in the health tabs worked before, but you will need to explicitly include an Error object if you want these error logs to show up in the Health tab or in the GCP Error Reporting. e.g.

functions.logger.error("this is functions logger error", new Error("From the functions logger"));

Since Node.js 10, Google Cloud Functions does not work very well with console.* family of functions, and I recommend that you stick with functions logger.

Check out https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/monitoring/error-reporting on examples of what log statement works/does not work with GCP error reporting tool (just replace console. with functions.logger.).

Let us know if this helps.

[larssn]

As I wrote, it used to log errors in Health tab when you did a logger.error. You could log anything.

The health tab now seemingly only reports unhandled errors. It can be problematic that your handled errors no longer shows up in the health tab. Imagine having to dig through a huge log file every day to find problems, instead of it being in the health tab.

[taeold]

@larssn Any recent changes to your function that you are aware of? Any recent version bump to Firebase Functions SDK or update to the nodejs runtime version?

I can check to see if there were any deliberate changes that were made in the Health tab, but AFAIK, health tab just fetches data from GCP Error Reporting (https://cloud.google.com/error-reporting), which only reports log.error that actually includes an error object. I think this behavior might be new in the Nodejs10 runtime.

[larssn]

Our NPM versions are updated regularly.

However we did switch to the Node 14 runtime, 3-4 months ago I'd say.

Thanks for the help! 😊