← Back to all languages

C error tracking

Know when your C app breaks, before your users do

A fatal-signal handler is the only automatic capture story that exists in plain C; it writes a raw backtrace to disk before the process actually terminates. Self-hosted, so nothing about a C app's errors or its users' data ever leaves infrastructure you control.

Install

cd sdks/c && cmake -B build && cmake --build build

# your own CMakeLists.txt
add_subdirectory(path/to/forge_ops/sdks/c)
target_link_libraries(your_app PRIVATE forgeops_tracker)

A fatal-signal handler is the only automatic capture story that exists in plain C; it writes a raw backtrace to disk before the process actually terminates.

Every client reports the same shape

Wherever it comes from, an event arrives with an exception class, a message, and a backtrace, plus whatever environment/release/server context that client can gather on its own. ForgeOps fingerprints and groups on the first three, so a C app's issues list works exactly the same way every other language's does: report the same bug a thousand times and it's still one row, not a thousand.

No agent, no sidecar: it's a plain HTTPS POST to your own ForgeOps instance's ingestion API, so nothing about a C app's traffic ever leaves infrastructure you control.


Works with your framework


The C client hooks in at the framework level, not by wrapping individual calls, so nothing about how you already write C code has to change.


Fatal signals

SIGSEGV and friends are caught via sigaction, since C has no exceptions at all to hook.

Explicit capture

forgeops_tracker_capture_error reports right where you'd otherwise just log an error code.

What it looks like

The issue list

Every C issue reported into a project shows up here: title, status, assignee, event count, and when it was last seen, the same columns as any other language's project.

The issue list for a project reporting from a C app

The issue detail

Every occurrence keeps its own timestamp, environment, release, and server, plus the backtrace exactly as C reported it, expandable per occurrence rather than flattened into one generic stack.

A C issue's detail page, showing its backtrace of binary image names and symbols, with no file paths or line numbers

Alerting

A new C issue, a regression, or a spike past a threshold you set can reach Slack, email, SMS, a voice call, or a generic webhook, configured per project, per trigger.

Notification rules configured per trigger and channel, e.g. a new issue to Slack, a regression to email

Heartbeats

For the failure mode error tracking can't see on its own: a C cron job or recurring task that's supposed to run but silently stopped. Each heartbeat gets its own ping URL and its own grace period before it alerts.

A heartbeat's ping URL and status, showing its expected interval, grace period, and last check-in

Questions

Do I need to change how I already handle errors?

No. Every client hooks the framework's own exception handling directly, the same way the install snippet above shows -- your own logs, error pages, and rescue blocks keep working exactly as they did before. ForgeOps just also finds out about it.

Where does the data actually go?

Straight to your own ForgeOps instance over plain HTTPS. No agent, no sidecar, no third-party ingestion service in between -- nothing about your app's traffic or its users' data ever leaves infrastructure you control.

What happens if the same bug fires a thousand times?

It's fingerprinted from its exception class, message, and backtrace, so a thousand reports of the same bug still show up as one issue with an event count of 1,000, not a thousand separate rows to dig through.

Is anything scrubbed before it's stored?

Yes. Emails, credit card numbers, and known API key/token formats are redacted out of every event before it's even written, on every plan, with room for per-project custom field names on top of the defaults.

Try it with your own C app

Free plan included, no credit card required.

Get started free