Perl error tracking
Know when your Perl app breaks, before your users do
ForgeOps connects the errors your Perl 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.
A PSGI middleware or a Dancer2 plugin reports anything that escapes a route, no further wiring needed. Running on ForgeOps' own dedicated infrastructure, so nothing about a Perl app's errors or its users' data gets routed through a third-party error-tracking vendor. See an incident investigated →
Install
cpanm ForgeOps::Tracker use ForgeOps::Tracker; ForgeOps::Tracker::init(dsn => 'https://<api_key>@getforgeops.net/api/v1/events');
A PSGI middleware or a Dancer2 plugin reports anything that escapes a route, no further wiring needed.
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 Perl 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 Perl app's traffic gets routed through a third-party pipeline first.
Works with your framework
The Perl client hooks in at the framework level, not by wrapping individual calls, so nothing about how you already write Perl code has to change.
PSGI / Plack
enable '+ForgeOps::Tracker::Integrations::PSGI' wraps any PSGI-speaking app, framework or not.
Dancer2
A plugin hooks Dancer2's own on_route_exception, before Dancer2 renders its own error page.
Plain scripts
Report explicitly at the catch site: ForgeOps::Tracker::report($@, context) after an eval block. Whatever's still queued is sent when the script ends (waiting at most 5 seconds); call ForgeOps::Tracker::flush($timeout) before POSIX::_exit or exec.
What it looks like
The issue list
Every Perl 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 detail
Every occurrence keeps its own timestamp, environment, release, and server, plus the backtrace exactly as Perl reported it, expandable per occurrence rather than flattened into one generic stack.
Alerting
A new Perl 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.
Heartbeats
For the failure mode error tracking can't see on its own: a Perl 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.
Performance monitoring
Two more integrations, one per framework, time every request too: the Dancer2 plugin reports the matched route's own pattern (e.g. "GET /users/:id", so a distinct user id doesn't explode into its own separate transaction); plain PSGI has no route-matching concept of its own, so that middleware reports the raw request path instead, and a Dancer2 request that never matches any route (a 404) isn't recorded at all, since Dancer2's own after_request hook never fires for that case. Counted in-process and flushed as a small periodic aggregate on a background thread. 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 0.7.0 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.
# PSGI / Plack
enable '+ForgeOps::Tracker::Integrations::PSGIPerformance';
# Dancer2
use ForgeOps::Tracker::Integrations::Dancer2Performance;
ForgeOps::Tracker::init(
dsn => '...',
track_performance => 0, # opt out entirely
performance_flush_interval => 30, # seconds; default 60
);
Distributed tracing
With the PSGI or Dancer2 performance middleware enabled, each request becomes a trace whose root span is the request itself; add the rest by hand. 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. Requires a plan that includes distributed tracing.
my $order = ForgeOps::Tracker::span('charge card', sub { $gateway->charge($id) },
kind => 'service', data => { order_id => $id });
ForgeOps::Tracker::span('fetch rates', sub { $http->get($url) }, kind => 'http');
# Something you timed yourself (kind is one of controller/service/database/redis/http/job/other;
# $started_at is Time::HiRes::time):
ForgeOps::Tracker::record_span('SELECT orders', 'database', $started_at, $duration_ms);
Errors now carry the request they happened in: its trace id, and under Dancer2 its endpoint (POST /checkout) too. Each occurrence links to its exact trace, and a request that fails is always traced, however fast. With PSGIPerformance or Dancer2Performance, a request that arrives with the standard traceparent header continues the caller's trace on its own; pass it on by wrapping an outbound call in http_span, which records it as an http span and hands you the headers to add, with any HTTP client. Once the projects are linked in ForgeOps an error shows the errors another project raised in the same request. Needs ForgeOps::Tracker 0.9.0.
my $response = ForgeOps::Tracker::http_span(POST => $url, sub {
my ($headers) = @_; # { traceparent => '00-...' }
$http->post($url, { headers => { %$headers, 'Content-Type' => 'application/json' }, content => $body });
});
ForgeOps::Tracker::init(
dsn => '...',
trace_propagation_targets => ['api.example.com'], # only these hosts; undef (the default) means all
);
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. DBI isn't instrumented automatically, so wrap a query in a database span and pass its SQL as statement; bind 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 ForgeOps::Tracker 0.11.0, on a plan that includes distributed tracing.
my $sql = "SELECT id FROM orders WHERE customer_id = ? AND status = 'open'";
my $ids = ForgeOps::Tracker::span('Load open orders',
sub { $dbh->selectcol_arrayref($sql, {}, $customer_id) },
kind => 'database', statement => $sql, db_system => 'postgresql');
# Sent as "SELECT id FROM orders WHERE customer_id = ? AND status = ?"
What changed
A feature flag flip or a config edit can break things with no deploy at all. Record one with record_change 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. init() also queues the Perl version once per process, so a Perl upgrade shows up with nothing to call; module versions are left out, since Perl has no single reliable record of which ones an app runs. Environment variable names (never values) are opt-in. Needs ForgeOps::Tracker 0.10.0, on a plan that includes change tracking.
ForgeOps::Tracker::init(
dsn => $ENV{FORGE_OPS_DSN},
detect_changes => 1, # the default; 0 sends no startup snapshot
track_env_var_names => 1, # default 0; names only, never values
);
ForgeOps::Tracker::record_change(
kind => 'feature_flag',
title => 'gateway_retry_v2 turned on for 100% of checkouts',
details => { 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 flush_metrics 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.
ForgeOps::Tracker::capture_metric('signup'); # value defaults to 1: a bare counter
ForgeOps::Tracker::capture_metric('payment', 49); # a real magnitude; it may be negative (a refund)
ForgeOps::Tracker::capture_infrastructure_metric('cpu', 0.42); # hostname defaults to server_name
ForgeOps::Tracker::capture_infrastructure_metric('disk', 0.81, hostname => 'db-1');
ForgeOps::Tracker::flush_metrics(); # optional: send right now
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. DBI puts the statement in the error text when the handle has ShowErrorStatement on (DBIx::Class turns it on for you), and this client reads it from there, never the bound values. 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.
my $dbh = DBI->connect($dsn, $user, $pass, { RaiseError => 1, ShowErrorStatement => 1 });
# Opt in to also sending the masked statement (default 0).
ForgeOps::Tracker::init(dsn => '...', capture_sql_statement => 1);
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 Perl app
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