Usage

Sentry's SDK hooks into your runtime environment and automatically reports errors, uncaught exceptions, and unhandled rejections as well as other types of errors depending on the platform.

The most common form of capturing is to capture errors. What can be captured as an error varies by platform. In general, if you have something that looks like an exception, it can be captured. For some SDKs, you can also omit the argument to capture_exception and Sentry will attempt to capture the current exception. It is also useful for manual reporting of errors or messages to Sentry.

While capturing an event, you can also record the breadcrumbs that lead up to that event. Breadcrumbs are different from events: they will not create an event in Sentry, but will be buffered until the next event is sent. Learn more about breadcrumbs in our Breadcrumbs documentation.

Capturing Errors

To capture an error or exception condition, create events containing an exception object:

#include <sentry.h>

sentry_value_t event = sentry_value_new_event();

sentry_value_t exc = sentry_value_new_exception("Exception", "Error message.");
sentry_event_add_exception(event, exc);

sentry_capture_event(event);

The above exception does not contain a stack trace, which must be added separately:

#include <sentry.h>

sentry_value_t event = sentry_value_new_event();

sentry_value_t exc = sentry_value_new_exception("Exception", "Error message.");
sentry_value_set_stacktrace(exc, NULL, 0);
sentry_event_add_exception(event, exc);

sentry_capture_event(event);

Capturing Messages

Another common operation is to capture a bare message. A message is textual information that should be sent to Sentry. Typically, our SDKs don't automatically capture messages, but you can capture them manually.

To simplify creating events, there are shorthand functions that construct prepopulated event objects. The most important one is sentry_value_new_message_event. The logger and message parameters are each optional.

#include <sentry.h>

sentry_value_t event = sentry_value_new_message_event(
  /*   level */ SENTRY_LEVEL_INFO,
  /*  logger */ "custom",
  /* message */ "It works!"
);

sentry_capture_event(event);

Manual Events

To create and capture a manual event, follow these steps:

1. Create an event value using sentry_value_new_event. This internally creates an object value and initializes it with common event attributes, like a timestamp and event_id.
2. Add custom attributes to the event, like a message or an exception.
3. Send the event to Sentry by invoking sentry_capture_event.

In a more complex example, it looks like this:

sentry_value_t event = sentry_value_new_event();
sentry_value_set_by_key(event, "message", sentry_value_new_string("Hello!"));

sentry_value_t screen = sentry_value_new_object();
sentry_value_set_by_key(screen, "width", sentry_value_new_int32(1920));
sentry_value_set_by_key(screen, "height", sentry_value_new_int32(1080));

sentry_value_t contexts = sentry_value_new_object();
sentry_value_set_by_key(contexts, "screen_size", screen);

sentry_value_set_by_key(event, "contexts", contexts);
sentry_capture_event(event);

For the full list of supported values, see Event Payloads and linked documents.