Error handling / events

[GiovaniGuizzo]

Discussed in #117

^{Originally posted by iffa October 11, 2025}
Background information: due to an oopsie of mine, our dev environment had an incorrect Sidequest config for a while which we did not notice because Sidequest's logging calls aren't intercepted by Sentry (and not sure if that's even a possibility). I was hoping to setup at least some form of explicit alerting to Sentry based on e.g. error events or DB connection issues or something similar, but I couldn't find anything in the docs about this. Is it possible to receive events (like engine not being able to start for reason X, job not being able to start due to e.g. incorrect sidequest.jobs.js definition, DB connection failing because of.. etc.)?

I know the "Pro" version down the line will have something like this at least but I do hope that this also finds it way to the basic version, as this is quite important stuff to have even for the most basic production apps. 🙏🏼

[Mortalife]

I know if you enable @opentelemetry/winston-transport you'll get Sidequest logs in whatever opentelemetry supported channel you have if @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node is enabled, which I think Sentry might do.

It would be really cool if the jobs class also created it's own traces/spans, to get Sidequest a little closer to the functionality of trigger.dev.

[GiovaniGuizzo]

@Mortalife should the jobs also implement that, or only the main application?

[Mortalife]

@Mortalife should the jobs also implement that, or only the main application?

From my testing so far so long as you start the main application with these settings it's working. I'm not sure if that's because the winston logger is logging to the main application stdout for the worker threads or because the worker threads are also pulling in the same --import tracing.js from the main application.

[GiovaniGuizzo]

Maybe winston automatically loads those configs? I don't know.

This is what we do for logs on all child processes and working threads

[Mortalife]

@GiovaniGuizzo As I understand it, the @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node package will load a bunch of different packages if they're also installed, this prevents you from having to manually load each one in your otel setup.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node#supported-instrumentations

One of the packages it will load if it exists is @opentelemetry/winston-transport, this will pull the winston logs created by the standard logger automatically without any further setup.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@opentelemetry/winston-transport

This package exports the Winston transport class that is used to send records to the OpenTelemetry Logs SDK. It can be used directly when configuring a Winston logger. If using @opentelemetry/instrumenation-winston package there is no need to instantiate the transport as the instrumentation will take care of that.

So basically, to get logging of winston logs, you just need to ensure @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node is installed and enabled, and @opentelemetry/winston-transport is installed.

Edit: On second look, @opentelemetry/winston-transport may be included automatically without needing to be installed. I'll check

[GiovaniGuizzo]

Nice. Feel free to create a PR to instrument the logger with it :)

[Mortalife]

Nice. Feel free to create a PR to instrument the logger with it :)

That's the magic part, you don't need to.

End user just needs to install @opentelemetry/winston-transport (which is needed)

[GiovaniGuizzo]

Ohhhhhhh really? Is it that simple?
That's one hell of a lib then :D

[GiovaniGuizzo]

https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js-contrib/tree/main/packages/instrumentation-winston

Yep, seems like it's easy. Maybe we should add this to the documentation then

[Mortalife]

Took another look at Sentry specifically, they don't use the auto-instrumentations-node like I presumed, they've rolled their own, they require passing in a custom winston transporter for logs to go to Sentry. So to support that you'll probably need to extend your logger options to allow passing of transports.

https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-javascript/releases/tag/9.12.0

But for generic otel, for sites like SigNoz/Datadog etc, @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node and @opentelemetry/winston-transport.

But if for whatever reason the user is not using @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node then yes they can use the steps documented in your link for instrumentation-winston