Logging breadcrumbs against a workflow

[brentkelly]

Hi - great library :).

Is there any way to do the equivalent to Sentry's logging breadcumbs against a workflow?

This would be super useful in conjunction with waterline.

[rmcdaniel]

I'm sure there is. I'm not too familiar with it. It seems like spans. You could do it with events depending on what information you want to capture.

https://laravel-workflow.com/docs/features/events

[brentkelly]

Here is an example of how it works in Sentry:

You can log a "breadcrumb" anywhere in your code, and then if a future exception occurs, all breadcrumb logging is visible in Sentry when inspecting that execution. In the context of laravel-workflow, the breadcrumb logging would appear in Waterline against the workflow that was executing at the time the breadcrumb was logged.

\Sentry\addBreadcrumb(new Breadcrumb(
    Breadcrumb::LEVEL_INFO,
    Breadcrumb::TYPE_DEFAULT,
    'response',
    json_encode([
        'status' => $response->getStatusCode(),
        'headers' =>   $response->getHeaders(),
        'body' => $response->getBody()->getContents()
    ])
));

The docblock for the methods:

Sentry\addBreadcrumb

function addBreadcrumb(Breadcrumb $breadcrumb): void { }
@param Breadcrumb $breadcrumb The breadcrumb to record
@return void

Sentry\Breadcrumb::__construct

public function __construct(
    string $level,
    string $type,
    string $category,
    ?string $message = null,
    array $metadata = [],
    ?float $timestamp = null
) { }
@param string $level The error level of the breadcrumb
@param string $type The type of the breadcrumb
@param string $category The category of the breadcrumb
@param string|null $message Optional text message
@param array<string, mixed> $metadata Additional information about the breadcrumb
@param float|null $timestamp Optional timestamp of the breadcrumb
@return void

Benefits

Using this approach you could log breadcrumbs in your workflows, and then have them automatically appear on the "Workflow view" page in Waterline when inspecting a completed, running or failed workflow execution. Here is how breadcrumbs show in the UI in Sentry:

This would be super powerful if you need to try & piece together what & why something happened after the fact. As an example you could have a workflow processing subscription payments, and you have an error reported someone was charged the wrong amount - you can look up the workflow execution in Waterline & see logging related to that specific execution which allows you to piece together exactly what went wrong.

Sure - you could just log to a log file. But this allows you to associate the logging in a tidy UI right there against the workflow execution in Waterline, rather than trawling through logs with logging from potentially many simultaneous workflow executions intermingled in the logs.