As you guys know, we've been working on notification improvements lately. This latest video update by Blake is no different and involves Slack integration!
If you're not familiar with Slack, definitely check it out. It's a great app for communicating with your team, and much more. For Exceptionless, it's been something we've wanted to integrate closely with for a while now, because email can be very tedious and overwhelming. With Slack integration, you can set up a specific channel for your Exceptionless notifications to go to, and have an organized eye on your events.
Watch the video above for an explanation of the integration, and see below on how to set it up for yourself.
First, go into your project's settings in the Exceptionless app and click on the Integrations tab.
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Then, click on "Add Slack Notifications" and log in to your slack team.
Once logged in, you will need to select the channel you want Exceptionless Notifications to post to and click Authorize.
Once authorized, you can then configure the different notification settings by going back to the Exceptionless app and into the project's integrations tab again.
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Once integrated and configured, notifications will look something like the below screenshot, with the message, type of event, stack trace, links to actions, etc.
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We're excited to keep improving notifications, and would love for you guys to test this out for us.
Integrations with other chat & productivity tools like HipChat and Microsoft Teams are on our list, as well, so if you use these please ping us and let us know so we can gauge interest!
Recently, we made several improvements to our email notifications, adding additional details, improving rendering, and more. Blake has mentioned it in a few of his weekly update videos, but today we wanted to walk you through it and add a few more details, with examples. Check it out!
We decided to use Zurb's Foundation for Emails to help us create emails that look great on all email clients. The reason we went with Zurb is because it has clean markup that translates to good old (ugly) HTML that just works. It also works great with Handlebars.Net which we use to render the email content.
An example of one of our event notification emails can be found here.
Then, we run a Node.js build task to transform the templates into some pretty crazy html markup that works everywhere. The markup at that link contains the Handlebars.Net syntax.
These templates are stored as embedded resources so we can use them from any environment and render them out with ease! Here is a code example of how we perform that task.
We added JSON-LD support, to the emails to give us rich contextual actions, by starting with this Google Developer tutorial and ended up with the below implementation. It's worth noting that we had to go through their verification process for the actions to be enabled.
We tested the emails in Outlook for Windows and Mac, Paper Cut, Gmail on Safari, and Apple Mail. Then, we used Litmus to test a wide range of clients before publishing and pushing everything live.
We hope our build out here can help other developers, and we would love to hear your feedback, questions, or comments either here on the blog or over on GitHub!
We've snuck in lots of updates for this past week! New features have been added, such as collecting project-level usage statistics, the ability to add notes to API keys, and much more. Oh, and we're no longer throttling free plans! That's for Exceptionless core, but we've also made updates to the Exceptionless UI and Foundatio core, Foundatio.Repositories, and Foundatio.Parsers. Check everything out, below.
We added the ability to collect project-level usage statistics. This allows us to view usage, show total blocked in emails, and more. It would also allow us to tweak rate limiting on a per-project basis.
You can now add notes to API keys in the app.
We also stopped throttling free plans.
And, finally, we introduced variou mail templates into the mix.
In the 5/1/17 weekly update, Blake talks email notification improvements, bug fixes, and Foundatio.Repositories and Foundatio.Parsers updates. Check out the video above or read the details below.
In the past few weeks, we have made massive improvements to the daily summary emails, and added support for json-ld. You can keep up with continued email improvements over on issue 177 on GitHub. Let us know what you think there!
We also fixed a bug with the Redis cache client improperly setting batch cached keys.
On May 3, Blake spoke at the North Dallas .NET User Group meetup in Plano. The topic was Exception Driven Development, and of course he killed it! Naturally, the Exceptionless love was shared to all.
For Exceptionless, we worked on upgrading the email templates to use Zurb for emails and handlebars. We also fixed an issue where you could only log in 15 times in a 15 minute time period.
Nothing too crazy going on in this week's update. A few tweaks to Exceptionless, Exceptionless.NET, and Exceptionless.JavaScript. Check out the details below, and don't forget to let us know how we're doing!
This week we released the Exceptionless 4.0.2 minor release with a few fixes and tweaks. Check out the Exceptionless 4.0.2 release details over on GitHub. Self hosters are the only ones that will need to worry about upgrading.
We also made some good strides in reducing the amount of IO work the event post queues have to do. Woohoo!
Lastly, for Exceptionless core, we merged in MailKit and continued improving email notifications.
For our JavaScript client, we want to work on supporting universal apps, but first we have to upgrade to the latest version of TypeScript, so we did some work this week toward that.
Last week we announced release notes for Exceptionless 4.0.2, Exceptionless.NET 4.0.3, and Exceptionless.UI 2.6.2. In our weekly update this week, we review some of those changes/updates, Foundatio changes, and more. Check it out!
In Exceptionless Core, we added support for MailKit, pipeline action and plugin level metrics, and the ability to dynamically shut down functionality via the configuration. We also made pipeline performance improvements. There are more performance improvements to make,
For Foundatio, we updated the Azure storage copy implementation to copy server side, fixed an issue where FolderFileStorage wasn't behaving properly when renaming files that exist, and fixed a Redis cache client issue where deleting cache items by wild card was erroring out if there were no matching keys.
Updated the azure storage copy implementation to copy server side.
This past week we released Exceptionless 4.0.2 and Exceptionless.NET 4.0.3, consisting of maintenance updates that fixed several usability issues for self hosters, various performance, issues, bug fixes, and some general improvements.
Below is a highlight of the release notes, and don't forget to let us know how we're doing or what can improve by following the relevant links to GitHub and posting an "issue."
Lastly, thanks to all of our contributors for helping us solve problems, add functionality, and improve Exceptionless!
Both @caesay and @edwardmeng submitted pull requests and helped us solve an issue with sending emails (issue #290). MailKit, a "cross-platform mail client library," has now been integrated, adding "fully featured and RFC-compliant SMTP, POP3, and IMAP client implementations" into Exceptionless.
There were also a few issues with email when hosting in different environments, such as Azure Functions. In this case, all email settings must be stored in settings and not web.config. So, we moved the MailKit implementation to the insulation project and cleaned up the main mailer class, among a few other tweaks, to further improve email sending in the app. Thanks again caesay and edwardmeng!
If you are self hosting, please update the email settings in appSettings
Support for Azure Storage Queues has been added to the app.
A bug that could cause an exception and make the stack work queue be abandoned when a stack of events was deleted has been fixed.
The GeoIP database was being downloaded each time the app was restarted. That has also been fixed.
Incorrect emails were being generated in some self hosted and dev environments because the BASE_URL didn't contain the proper hashbang (#!). Fixed that issue in this release, as well.
You should only worry about upgrading if you are a self hoster. If this is the case, please see the Exceptionless self hosting documentation. Note that changes to the Elasticsearch configuration were made in this release, so make sure to review the documentation for more information.
404 reporting support in ASP.NET Core has been added.
You can now set the min log level in configuration by calling SetDefaultMinLogLevel, allowing you to set a temporary min log level that is used until the server settings are retrieved.
Client IP support for X-Forwarded-For has been added (thanks @barankaynak!), which enables us to properly identify individual users and also helps when using proxy servers.
You can now more easily capture the HttpActionContext by adding SetHttpActionContext extension methods to web clients, allowing request and user info to be captured by default when manually submitting events.
We added SetException overload so you can now submit any event type with an exception object. So, for instance, you can now submit a log message through with an exception object and the exception tab will show.
Fixed an issue where the ASP.NET Core 1.1 runtime was sometimes preventing clients from reporting any data.
Fixed an issue where exceptions that converted to 404's were not running the event exclusion logic.
Fixed an issue where the duplicate checker plugin could DOS itself if you had client logging enabled (disabled by default - only meant for diagnostic logging).
Fixed an issue where the NLog logger wasn't setting event type.
Fixed an issue with package configuration of signed web packages.
Fixed an issue where adding our trace listener could blow up due to other invalid configured trace listeners.
Upgraded to the latest version of BenchMarkDotNet and ensure benchmarks run (Contrib @adamsitnik)
March was a productive month! We got tons done, and we're here to share everything with you so you're up to date and can hold us accountable if you notice any bugs in the changes.
Search query fix, Implemented AsyncAutoResetEvent in Foundatio, Upgraded project format #
Fixed an issue in Exceptionless where any search query starting with data. was being modified.
In Foundatio, the main repository that will contain the default deployment and EditorConfig settings for all of our projects, an effort was made to use less locking in queues and the CacheLockProvider by using AsyncAutoResetEvent, a lighter weight async primitive.
We also upgraded to the new VS2017 project format in our Foundatio repositories.
For Foundatio, a new pull request was made for Amazon SQS queues and CloudWatch metrics. We've done a lot of work to queues and the message buses to make the constructors have options classes that get passed in. We've also done a lot of work to the Azure implementations to try and optimize them and fix bugs.
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