Swift error tracking

Know when your Swift app breaks, before your users do

ForgeOps connects the errors your Swift 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.

Captures an uncaught NSException or fatal signal automatically, the same crash reporter model as this repo's own Objective-C client. Running on ForgeOps' own dedicated infrastructure, so nothing about a Swift app's errors or its users' data gets routed through a third-party error-tracking vendor. See an incident investigated →

Install

// Package.swift
dependencies: [ .package(url: "https://github.com/Luke-Popwell/forge-ops-tracker-swift.git", from: "0.6.0") ]

import ForgeOpsTracker
ForgeOpsTracker.configure { config in
    config.dsn = "https://<api_key>@getforgeops.net/api/v1/events"
}
ForgeOpsTracker.installHandlers()

Captures an uncaught NSException or fatal signal automatically, the same crash reporter model as this repo's own Objective-C client.

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 Swift 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 Swift app's traffic gets routed through a third-party pipeline first.


Works with your framework


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


Uncaught NSException / fatal signals

The same two mechanisms this repo's Objective-C client covers; fatalError() and a failed force-unwrap crash through this same path too.

Swift Error

capture(error:) reports a plain thrown Error at the catch site, since Swift's throws/catch has no uncaught-error mechanism to hook automatically.

What it looks like

The issue list

Every Swift 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 Swift app

The issue detail

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

A Swift 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 Swift 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 Swift 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

Performance monitoring

Times whatever you wrap and reports one small aggregate per transaction, flushed on Configuration.performanceFlushInterval, never one network call per timed call. This client has no web framework integration, so nothing is timed automatically: you choose what to wrap. Keep transaction names low-cardinality ("GET /users/:id", not "GET /users/42"), since every distinct name is its own row. measureTransaction records even if the block throws, and is safe to call from any thread. Turn it off with trackPerformance = false. An iOS app is suspended shortly after it goes to the background and nothing is flushed at exit, so call ForgeOpsTracker.flushPerformance() yourself from applicationDidEnterBackground or sceneDidEnterBackground, or before a command-line tool quits. Each report also carries a small latency histogram, 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. 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.

The Performance page, showing each transaction's request count and p50, p95 and p99 latency, plus slow queries
// Wrap a block; recorded even if it throws (the error propagates unchanged), and its value comes back:
let user = try ForgeOpsTracker.measureTransaction("load-user") { try loadUser(id) }

// Or record a duration you measured yourself, in milliseconds:
ForgeOpsTracker.recordPerformance("nightly-export", durationMs: elapsedMs)

Distributed tracing

One flow's own call tree, such as a screen load, a sign-in, or a network round trip and what it triggered. A mobile flow hops between queues, so a trace is an explicit object you pass around or capture in a closure, safe to use from any thread. Only a slow flow's trace is ever sent: whether it crossed the threshold (one second by default, configurable) is decided entirely inside your app, so a fast flow costs nothing over the wire. Requires a plan that includes distributed tracing.

A trace's waterfall for one slow request, with its controller, service, database, cache and HTTP spans
ForgeOpsTracker.trace("load home screen") { trace in
    let feed = trace.measureSpan("fetch feed", kind: "http") { fetchFeed() }
    trace.measureSpan("decode", kind: "service", data: ["items": feed.count]) { decode(feed) }
}

// Or hold the trace across queues and finish it when the flow ends:
let trace = ForgeOpsTracker.startTrace("checkout")
DispatchQueue.global().async { trace.recordSpan("charge", kind: "http", startedAt: started, durationMs: ms) }
trace.finish()

Make a request through the trace and it goes out with the standard traceparent header, recorded as its own http span, so your backend's request nests under it. Report a failure with that trace and the error carries its trace id: with your backend on the current ForgeOps server SDK and the two projects linked in ForgeOps, the failed checkout shows the API error from the very same request. Limit which hosts get the header with tracePropagationTargets. Needs tag 0.4.0.

A mobile app's checkout failure listing the API's gateway timeout as the same request, matched by trace ID
let trace = ForgeOpsTracker.startTrace("checkout")
defer { trace.finish() }

do {
    let (_, response) = try await trace.measureRequest(request) { try await URLSession.shared.data(for: $0) }
    guard (response as? HTTPURLResponse)?.statusCode == 201 else { throw CheckoutError.rejected }
} catch {
    ForgeOpsTracker.capture(error: error, context: ["order_id": order.id], trace: trace)
}

SQL in a request

When an error is captured inside a trace that ran database queries, its issue opens with the slowest of them: how long it took, its share of the trace's time, how many queries ran, and a likely N+1 warning when the same statement ran five or more times. Pass a query's SQL as statement: on a database span (a query against the app's own SQLite database, say). The statement is masked before it leaves your device, 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 tag 0.6.0, 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
let sql = "SELECT * FROM messages WHERE thread_id = 42 AND read = 0"

ForgeOpsTracker.trace("load inbox") { trace in
    let messages = trace.measureSpan("Load messages", kind: "database", statement: sql, dbSystem: "sqlite") {
        try? database.query(sql)
    }
    show(messages)
}
// Sent as "SELECT * FROM messages WHERE thread_id = ? AND read = ?"

What changed

When a feature flag flips or a remote config value changes, record it from your flag client's callback, 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 releases, labeled potentially relevant, never as the cause. "Crashes started right after new_checkout turned on" becomes one glance. recordChange returns immediately and sends on a private serial queue, off the main thread, and never throws or crashes. An app has no deploy of its own to compare, so every change is one you record. Needs tag 0.5.0, 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
import ForgeOpsTracker

// Your flag client's change listener, with the key and the old and new values
flagClient.onFlagChanged { key, oldValue, newValue in
    ForgeOpsTracker.recordChange(
        "feature_flag",
        title: "\(key) turned \(newValue ? "on" : "off")",
        details: ["key": key, "from": oldValue, "to": newValue],
        actor: "flag-service"
    )
}

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 flushMetrics sends whatever is buffered right now. An infrastructure reading needs a hostname, and this client has no server name by default, so pass one or set the server name; a reading with none is dropped. 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)
ForgeOpsTracker.captureMetric("signup")                 // value defaults to 1: a bare counter
ForgeOpsTracker.captureMetric("payment", value: 49)     // a real magnitude; it may be negative (a refund)

ForgeOpsTracker.captureInfrastructureMetric("cpu", value: 0.42)                     // hostname defaults to serverName
ForgeOpsTracker.captureInfrastructureMetric("disk", value: 0.81, hostname: "db-1")
ForgeOpsTracker.flushMetrics()                          // 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. GRDB's DatabaseError carries the statement, and the error text GRDB and SQLite produce is recognized too, so a local database error needs nothing added. Core Data exposes no statement. 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
ForgeOpsTracker.configure { config in
    config.captureSqlStatement = true // default false
    // config.captureSqlObjects = false // default true; false stops even the names
}

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 Swift app

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