Error Reporting

Error Reporting is a Google Cloud service that automatically analyses log entries to identify, aggregate, and track application errors. Instead of manually searching through thousands of log entries for exceptions, Error Reporting groups related errors together, tracks their frequency over time, and alerts you when new errors appear. It is tightly integrated with Cloud Logging and Cloud Trace.

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How Error Reporting Works

Error Reporting scans log entries written to Cloud Logging for recognised error patterns — primarily exception stack traces and error-level log entries. When it finds an error, it:

1. Parses the error message and stack trace
2. Groups errors with the same root cause together (same exception type and stack trace)
3. Tracks the frequency of each error group over time
4. Alerts when a new error group appears for the first time

Automatic Detection

Error Reporting automatically detects errors from several Google Cloud services without any additional configuration:

Service	What is Detected
App Engine	Unhandled exceptions, application crashes
Cloud Functions	Uncaught exceptions, function timeout errors
Cloud Run	Container crashes, unhandled exceptions in request handlers
GKE	Container exceptions written to stderr
Compute Engine	Errors reported through the Ops Agent or client libraries

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Error Groups

The core concept in Error Reporting is the error group — a collection of error events that share the same root cause. Error Reporting groups errors by:

• Exception type — e.g., NullPointerException, ConnectionRefusedError
• Stack trace similarity — errors with the same call stack are grouped together, even if the error message differs slightly
• Service and version — errors are scoped to a specific service and version for multi-service applications

Error Group Details

Each error group provides:

Field	Description
Error message	The error message or exception text
Stack trace	The full call stack at the time of the error
First seen	When the error first appeared
Last seen	The most recent occurrence
Occurrences	Total count and a histogram showing frequency over time
Affected services	Which services and versions produced this error
Affected users	Count of unique users who experienced the error (if user context is provided)
Linked issues	Links to bug tracking systems (e.g., Jira, GitHub Issues)

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Reporting Errors from Your Application

Using the Client Library (Python)

from google.cloud import error_reporting

client = error_reporting.Client()

try:
    result = process_order(order_id)
except Exception:
    client.report_exception()

Using the Client Library (Node.js)

const { ErrorReporting } = require('@google-cloud/error-reporting');
const errors = new ErrorReporting();

app.get('/api/orders/:id', async (req, res) => {
  try {
    const order = await getOrder(req.params.id);
    res.json(order);
  } catch (err) {
    errors.report(err);
    res.status(500).send('Internal Server Error');
  }
});

Using Structured Logging

You can report errors without a client library by writing structured JSON to Cloud Logging with the correct format: