Error Tracking & Monitoring

This skill provides reusable patterns for integrating error tracking and performance monitoring into services, jobs, and scripts.

While examples may mention Sentry-style APIs, the principles apply to any monitoring backend.

Purpose

• •Ensure failures are observable (no silent failures).
• •Capture enough context to debug (without leaking secrets).
• •Make performance issues diagnosable (traces/spans, slow queries, hot paths).

When to Use

Use this skill when:

• •Adding new endpoints, controllers, or middleware
• •Adding background jobs / scheduled tasks
• •Handling errors from external systems (DB, APIs, queues)
• •Refactoring error handling and logging
• •Adding performance spans or profiling

Core rules

1. •Capture exceptions to a monitoring backend (not only console.error).
2. •Attach context: service name, environment, operation name, request correlation id (if available), and user identity (if safe).
3. •Initialize early: monitoring SDK should be initialized before application logic.
4. •Do not leak secrets: redact tokens, passwords, raw PII, and full request bodies unless explicitly approved.
5. •Prefer structured logs: logs should be queryable and correlated with traces.

Patterns

Controller / request handler

try {
  // handler logic
} catch (err) {
  monitor.captureException(err, {
    tags: { layer: "controller", route: "your/<route>", method: "POST" },
  });
  throw err;
}

Background jobs

• •Initialize monitoring at process start.
• •Wrap the job in a single top-level span/transaction.
• •Ensure non-zero exit codes on failure (so infra can detect it).

Performance spans

return monitor.startSpan({ name: "db.query", op: "db" }, async () => {
  return await doDatabaseOperation();
});

Checklist (for new code)

• • Monitoring initialized early
• • Exceptions captured with useful tags/context
• • Errors are re-thrown or converted into explicit failure responses (no swallowing)
• • Sensitive fields are redacted
• • Key operations include spans/traces
• • A minimal test exists to verify capture behavior (unit/integration)

Related

• •/.system/skills/ssot/backend/backend-dev-guidelines/SKILL.md
• •/.system/skills/ssot/frontend/frontend-dev-guidelines/SKILL.md