Currently we are looking to add active monitoring to our agents. Unfortunately the errors we get aren’t particular useful as we can’t link them to any person or activity.
Is it possible to add a userid in the log and maybe a bit of info regarding where the user is within the app. e.g. the component name or the application name. (If possible if the error occurred during a sync work too)
Without these its very hard to track where and when the error is occuring.
Hi Matt,
Yes, this is a request we’ve heard from several customers, and I understand the difficulty. Without knowing which user or activity an error relates to, investigating it can be challenging.
The agent currently has limited context about who is performing an action or where they are in a flow, unless that information is explicitly passed through variables. The Flow clients are better placed to capture that context. A telemetry feature is in development, and this is the kind of troubleshooting we want it to support alongside performance early warnings etc.
There are some data privacy considerations to work through, though. Today, Novacura does not store the data exchanged between the mobile clients and the ERP. Capturing detailed diagnostics would mean storing additional information, potentially including error messages, the location within a flow, and variable values at the time of the error.
We’re considering a few approaches. One is an opt-in feature that lets your organization decide whether this diagnostic information can be collected and stored. Another is to keep the logging on your own infrastructure, potentially through the agent as you suggest, so the diagnostic data remains under your control.
The user, application or component, and whether the error occurred during a sync are all useful examples of the context needed. We haven’t finalized exactly what will be captured or how it will be stored, so I can’t confirm those details yet, but your request aligns well with what we’re working toward.
But it would be interesting to get your feedback on the above so please chime in.
Hi Ola,
For our purposes, detailed logging locally on our own infrastructure would work well as we have systems in place to identify errors and report back to us via email. Our servers are heavily restricted so data privacy concerns aren’t too worrisome, however if we could flag specific variables in the flow itself to be reported within the logs that would be great as we would have full control of what information we are storing as we can exclude any sensitive customer information.
Application context is key to understanding these issues so the more information we can store related to the user’s flow the better.
That is not a bad idea: set the sensitivity level on the variable itself (and let that decide whether it should be logged in case of an error).
If you have that, would you be comfortable with us storing the errors, including the non-sensitive variables? It will be customer-specific, so only you can see your errors, of course. But the data would be stored in our Azure tenant (where we host Flow Connect).
It is how we’ve done logging with other software so I think would be a good solution for Nova Cura too.
Yes I think in this case it would be fine for you to store it.