.NET error tracking

Know when your .NET app breaks, before your users do

ForgeOps connects the errors your .NET app reports to the deploys, traces, and changes around them, so when production breaks, the incident already says who's affected, what changed, and where to look.

Reports every unhandled request exception, then re-throws it unchanged. Running on ForgeOps' own dedicated infrastructure, so nothing about a .NET app's errors or its users' data gets routed through a third-party error-tracking vendor. See an incident investigated →

Install

dotnet add package ForgeOpsTracker.Client

builder.Services.AddForgeOpsTracker(config =>
{
    config.Dsn = builder.Configuration["ForgeOps:Dsn"] ?? config.Dsn; // falls back to FORGE_OPS_DSN
});
app.UseForgeOpsTracker();

Reports every unhandled request exception, then re-throws it unchanged.

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 .NET 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 ForgeOps' own ingestion API, so nothing about a .NET app's traffic gets routed through a third-party pipeline first.


Works with your framework


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


ASP.NET Core

Middleware in the request pipeline reports before re-throwing, so your own error pages still render normally.

Worker services

Wrap Main in a try/catch, or hook AppDomain.UnhandledException for anything outside a web request.

Console apps

ForgeOpsTrackerSdk.Capture(ex) followed by exiting, or by rethrowing, is still sent, and so are TraceAsync traces (waiting at most 5 seconds for both); await ForgeOpsTrackerSdk.FlushAsync(ct) before Environment.FailFast.

What it looks like

The issue list

Every .NET 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 .NET app

The issue detail

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

A .NET issue's page in ForgeOps: its title, the exception class and the code it came from beneath it, then its verdict with its failure count, customers affected, and when it was first seen, above the triage buttons

Alerting

A new .NET issue, a regression, or a spike past a threshold you set can reach Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, 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 .NET 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

Release health

Once your app is reporting into ForgeOps, every request through the ASP.NET Core middleware also counts as a session: crash-free unless an unhandled exception (or a 5xx response) actually affects it. That gives each release's row on a project's Releases page a real crash-free rate, not just an event count. On by default; counted in-process and flushed as one small aggregate report every 60 seconds, not one network call per request. Requires a plan that includes release health; on a plan that doesn't, the periodic reports are accepted but not recorded (the response says why), so a working setup never looks broken.

A project's Releases page, showing each release's crash-free rate and session count next to its issue and event totals
builder.Services.AddForgeOpsTracker(config =>
{
    config.TrackSessions = false; // opt out entirely
    config.SessionFlushInterval =
        TimeSpan.FromSeconds(30); // default 60
});
app.UseForgeOpsTracker();
app.UseForgeOpsTrackerSessionTracking();

Performance monitoring

Once UseForgeOpsTrackerPerformanceTracking() below is registered after UseRouting(), every request also times its own duration, bucketed by transaction (the matched endpoint's own route pattern, e.g. "GET /users/{id}", not the raw path, so a distinct user id doesn't explode into its own separate transaction; falls back to the raw path for a request that never matched a route) and flushed as a small periodic aggregate every 60 seconds, the same delivery philosophy as release health above. Requires a plan that includes performance monitoring; on a plan that doesn't, the periodic reports are accepted but not recorded (the response says why), so a working setup never looks broken. Each report also carries a small latency histogram (version 0.9.0 and later), so ForgeOps shows an approximate p50/p95/p99 per transaction, not just an average, accurate to the width of the latency bucket a duration falls into.

The Performance page, showing each transaction's request count and p50, p95 and p99 latency, plus slow queries
app.UseRouting();
app.UseForgeOpsTracker();
app.UseForgeOpsTrackerPerformanceTracking(); // must come after UseRouting()

builder.Services.AddForgeOpsTracker(config =>
{
    config.TrackPerformance = false; // opt out entirely
    config.PerformanceFlushInterval =
        TimeSpan.FromSeconds(30); // default 60
});

Distributed tracing

With the performance tracking middleware already installed, each request becomes a trace, and every outbound call made through an IHttpClientFactory client nests in as an http span. Only a slow request's trace is ever sent: whether it crossed the threshold (one second by default, configurable) is decided entirely inside your process, so a fast request costs nothing over the wire. Wrap the rest by hand. Requires a plan that includes distributed tracing.

A trace's waterfall for one slow request, with its controller, service, database, cache and HTTP spans
var order = await ForgeOpsTrackerSdk.SpanAsync("load order", () => repo.FindAsync(id), kind: "database",
    data: new Dictionary<string, object?> { ["orderId"] = id });
var total = ForgeOpsTrackerSdk.Span("price", () => Price(order)); // kind defaults to "service"

using (ForgeOpsTrackerSdk.StartSpan("render", "service")) { Render(order); }

// Something you timed yourself (kind is one of controller/service/database/redis/http/job/other):
ForgeOpsTrackerSdk.RecordSpan("SELECT orders", "database", startedAt, durationMs);

Errors now carry the request they happened in: its endpoint (POST /checkout) and its trace id. An issue names its affected endpoint, each occurrence links to its exact trace, and a request that fails is always traced, however fast. The trace follows the request across services in the standard traceparent header, picked up from whatever called your ASP.NET Core app through the middleware and passed on to whatever it calls through an IHttpClientFactory client, so once the projects are linked in ForgeOps an error shows the errors another project raised in the same request. Needs ForgeOpsTracker.Client 0.11.0.

One trace waterfall running from a mobile app's checkout tap into the API it called, with the API's controller, database, and payment calls nested underneath, each project labeled
builder.Services.AddForgeOpsTracker(config =>
{
    config.PropagateTraces = true;                                           // the default
    config.TracePropagationTargets = new List<object> { "api.example.com" }; // only these hosts; null (the default) means all
});
builder.Services.AddHttpClient("payments"); // IHttpClientFactory clients carry the header

SQL in a request

When the request an issue failed in was traced, the issue opens with its slowest query: how long it took, its share of the request's time, how many queries the request ran, and a likely N+1 warning when the same statement ran five or more times. Wrap a query in DatabaseSpanAsync (or DatabaseSpan, or StartDatabaseSpan) and pass its SQL; parameter values are never read. The statement is masked before it leaves your process, every string and number replaced with a question mark, and the same SQL shows under that span's bar in the trace's waterfall. Needs ForgeOpsTracker.Client 0.13.0, on a plan that includes distributed tracing.

An issue's Slowest query in this request card: a 2.7 second order search that took 86% of a 3.2 second request, a likely N+1 warning for a line_items query run 24 times, and the query plan calling out a sequential scan on orders
const string OpenOrders = "SELECT id FROM orders WHERE customer_id = @customer AND status = 'open'";

app.MapGet("/orders/{customerId:long}", async (long customerId, NpgsqlDataSource db) =>
    await ForgeOpsTrackerSdk.DatabaseSpanAsync("Load open orders", OpenOrders, async () =>
    {
        await using var command = db.CreateCommand(OpenOrders);
        command.Parameters.AddWithValue("customer", customerId);
        var ids = new List<long>();
        await using var reader = await command.ExecuteReaderAsync();
        while (await reader.ReadAsync()) ids.Add(reader.GetInt64(0));
        return ids;
    }, dbSystem: "postgresql"));
// Sent as "SELECT id FROM orders WHERE customer_id = @customer AND status = ?"

What changed

A feature flag flip or a config edit can break things with no deploy at all. Record one with RecordChange (or an injected ChangeTracker in ASP.NET Core) and it shows under What changed on any issue that starts in the next two hours, and on the project's Changes page beside your deploys, labeled potentially relevant, never as the cause. Shortly after startup the client also sends the .NET runtime version, once per process, so a runtime upgrade shows up with nothing to call; package versions are left out, since .NET has no reliable way to list them at runtime. Environment variable names (never values) are opt-in. Needs ForgeOpsTracker.Client 0.12.0, on a plan that includes change tracking.

An issue's verdict listing what changed just before it started, labeled potentially relevant: the gateway_retry_v2 flag turned on for 100% of checkouts 3 minutes before, and a stripe upgrade and a new environment variable detected at startup after the deploy 7 minutes before
ForgeOpsTrackerSdk.Configure(config =>
{
    config.Dsn = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("FORGE_OPS_DSN");
    config.DetectChanges = true;    // the default; false sends no startup snapshot
    config.TrackEnvVarNames = true; // default false; names only, never values
});

ForgeOpsTrackerSdk.RecordChange(
    ChangeKind.FeatureFlag,
    "gateway_retry_v2 turned on for 100% of checkouts",
    details: new Dictionary<string, object?> { ["flag"] = "gateway_retry_v2", ["from"] = "10%", ["to"] = "100%" },
    actor: "priya@example.com");

Custom metrics and infrastructure monitoring

Track a business event you name yourself (a signup, a payment) or a reading from one of your own hosts, with one explicit call each; nothing is automatic. The value defaults to 1, so a bare call is a counter; pass a real amount for anything else (it can be negative, for a refund). A captured value is stored as its own row, so counts and sums you compute later are exact. Calls are buffered and flushed as one batch in the background, so they are safe to make inside a request, and FlushAsync sends whatever is buffered right now. The hostname of an infrastructure reading defaults to the configured server name. Requires a plan that includes custom metrics and infrastructure monitoring.

A dashboard with custom-metric widgets (orders placed, checkout conversion, orders over time) and infrastructure widgets (average readings by host and by metric)
metrics.CaptureMetric("signup");            // value defaults to 1: a bare counter
metrics.CaptureMetric("payment", 49);       // a real magnitude; it may be negative (a refund)

metrics.CaptureInfrastructureMetric("cpu", 0.42);                  // hostname defaults to ServerName
metrics.CaptureInfrastructureMetric("disk", 0.81, "db-1");
await metrics.FlushAsync();                                        // optional: send right now

ForgeOpsTrackerSdk.CaptureMetric("signup");                        // the same, without DI

Database errors

When an error comes from a database call, the issue shows which stored procedure, table or view its SQL touched, so you know where to start looking. Npgsql's PostgresException carries the statement, and any exception type can carry it if you attach it where you ran the query. The names are sent by default and are identifiers, never values. The SQL statement itself is opt-in, with every string and number replaced by a question mark before it leaves your app, and a project setting can stop ForgeOps storing the statement at all.

An issue occurrence's Database section, naming the stored function and the view the failing query touched, with the statement's values replaced by question marks
catch (Exception e)
{
    e.Data[SqlStatement.ExplicitDataKey] = query; // or "forge_ops_sql"
    throw;
}

// Opt in to also sending the masked statement (default false).
config.CaptureSqlStatement = true;

Questions

Do I need to change how I already handle errors?

Almost never. Every client hooks the framework's own exception handling directly, the same way the install snippet above shows, so your own logs, error pages, and rescue blocks keep working exactly as they did before, and ForgeOps just also finds out about it. The one common exception is a background-job runner that doesn't forward through that same mechanism on its own; that needs one small hook added instead, not a change to anything already there.

Where does the data actually go?

Straight to ForgeOps' own ingestion API over plain HTTPS. No agent, no sidecar, and no third-party ingestion service in between, so nothing about your app's traffic or its users' data gets routed through anyone else's pipeline first.

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. And a runaway loop can't use up your monthly event quota: once one issue repeats faster than your plan's hourly limit (50 an hour on Free), further repeats are still counted, and still count toward spike alerts, but they aren't stored or charged to your quota.

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 .NET app

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