Node.js SDK

captureError

Your lambda function may throw an exception, but your function handles it in order to respond to the requester without throwing the error. One very common example is functions tied to HTTP endpoints. Those usually should still return JSON, even if there is an error since the API Gateway integration will fail rather than returning a meaningful error.

For this case, we provide a captureError function available on either the context.serverlessSdk or on the module imported from './serverless_sdk'. This will cause the invocation to still display as an error in the serverless dashboard while allowing you to return an error to the user.

Here is an example of how to use it from the context object:

module.exports.hello = async (event, context) => {
  try {
    // do some real stuff but it throws an error, oh no!
    throw new Error('aa');
  } catch (error) {
    context.serverlessSdk.captureError(error);
  }
  return {
    statusCode: 500,
    body: JSON.stringify({ name: 'bob' }),
  };
};

And to import it instead, import with const { captureError } = require('./serverless_sdk') then call captureError instead of context.serverlessSdk.captureError.

const { captureError } = require('./serverless_sdk');

module.exports.hello = async (event) => {
  try {
    // do some real stuff but it throws an error, oh no!
    throw new Error('aa');
  } catch (error) {
    captureError(error);
  }
  return {
    statusCode: 500,
    body: JSON.stringify({ name: 'bob' }),
  };
};

span

While the serverless_sdk automatically instruments AWS SDK and HTTP spans, you may be interested in capturing span data for functions that do numerical computation or functions making database queries. For this use-case, you can use the span function provided by serverless_sdk. The first argument is a string, which will be used as the label of your span in the Dashboard. And the second argument is a function. If it returns a Promise, then so will span if it does not, span will return nothing.

Example from context with an async function:

module.exports.handler = async (event, context) => {
  await context.serverlessSdk.span('some-label', async () => {
    // The execution of this function is captured as a span.
    // It is automatically invoked with no arguments and awaited.
  });
};

Example from context with a sync function:

module.exports.handler = async (event, context) => {
  context.serverlessSdk.span('some-label', () => {
    // The execution of this function is captured as a span.
    // It is automatically invoked with no arguments.
  });
};

You can also import the function from './serverless_sdk'

const { span } = require('./serverless_sdk');
module.exports.handler = async (event, context) => {
  span('some-label', () => {
    // The execution of this function is captured as a span.
    // It is automatically invoked with no arguments.
  });
};

tagEvent

Busy applications can invoke hundreds of thousands of requests per minute! At these rates, finding specific invocations can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. We've felt this pain, which is why we've introduced tagged events. Tagged Events are a simple way to identify invocations in the Serverless Dashboard. You can tag an invocation with any string you like, and find all invocations associated with that tag. To provide extra context, you can specify a tag value to optionally filter on. If you're accustomed to logging out a debugging object, you can pass a third custom attribute that will be surfaced in the dashboard as well.

The tagEvent function is available on either the context.serverlessSdk or on the module imported from './serverless_sdk'.

Here is an example of how to use it from the context.serverlessSdk object:

module.exports.hello = async (event, context) => {
  // ... set up some state/custom logic
  context.serverlessSdk.tagEvent('customer-id', event.body.customerId, {
    demoUser: true,
    freeTrialExpires: '2020-09-01',
  });
  return {
    statusCode: 200,
    body: JSON.stringify({ name: 'bob' }),
  };
};

Automatic route instrumentation with application middleware

Faced with practical considerations (a big one being CloudFormation stack resource limit), developers often reach for a single function solution with routing being handled by the application layer. This is usually accomplished either by leveraging plugins that extend popular application frameworks to play nicely with the Lambda runtime (e.g. serverless-express), using a purpose-built one (like lambda-api), or even rolling their own (via lambda-router).

An unfortunate downside of this approach is the loss of visibility into the mapped route for invocations. Instead, you're left with either the catch-all API Gateway resource path (/{proxy+}) or the raw request url itself (e.g. /org/foo/user/bar/orders). Neither of which are conducive for exploration and debugging invocations. The former is not very useful and the latter wouldn't let you group invocations by their routed endpoints to bubble up say, performance issues.

To alleviate these issues, for an application using serverless-express or lambda-api, the SDK will automatically instrument incoming invocations to set the routed endpoint. There's zero setup required!

If your application is using a custom-built router, you can still work around this issue by calling the setEndpoint SDK function described below.

Once set, invocations can be explored and inspected by endpoint in the Dashboard.

setEndpoint

Allows the application to explicitly set the routed endpoint for an invocation. Like the other SDK methods, setEndpoint is available on either the context object: context.serverlessSdk, or can be imported manually from the base directory: const { setEndpoint } = require('./serverless_sdk'). Example usage:

module.exports.api = async (event, context) => {
  context.serverlessSdk.setEndpoint('/api/foo');
  // application code...
};