Handling Errors

Overview

While we hope that your workflows never break, in practice every engineer knows things don’t always go as planned. Alloy Embedded makes it easy to debug workflows.

How it Works

Workflow errors can happen for a number of reasons including but not limited to:

The end user revoked the API connection
The data field mapping was set up incorrectly
The Third Party App's API is temporarily down

For all of these reasons, it’s best to ensure you’re properly handling errors and have a system in place for when things go wrong. Alloy Embedded has a series of error handling mechanisms to make the tedious task of debugging a little less frustrating.

Streaming Errors back to your Application

The easiest way to accurately handle errors within Alloy Embedded is to set up an endpoint where Alloy Embedded can send raw error data to. Similar to how we handle data streaming from a Third Party App, by configuring this option in Alloy Embedded, we will send you realtime error statuses whenever a workflow fails.

To enable this feature, navigate to the Settings > Logging page and enter your webhook URL. When you’re done, remember to hit the Save Changes button.

Now, whenever an error occurs, we’ll stream that error log data in real time to this endpoint. In order to identify which workflow the error came from, we’ll send you the following identifiers as headers:

X-Alloy-WorkflowId
X-Alloy-UserId
X-Alloy-BlockName
X-Alloy-BlockType
X-Alloy-ExecutionUuid

You can read more about these headers here.

Using Amazon EventBridge to Stream Errors

Alternatively if you're a heavy AWS user, you can also use Amazon EventBridge to stream error messages to your cloud event bus.

To enable this, navigate to the Settings > Logging page and enter your AWS configuration keys as seen in the screenshot below.

Note that the IAM user associated with these keys must have AmazonEventBridgeFullAccess access.

Once you're finished, hit the Connect button to finalize your integration.

Wrapping up

In this tutorial, we looked at how to best handle errors in Alloy Embedded. Alloy Embedded offers a handful of ways to properly debug workflow errors including: (1) streaming error logs to your webhook server and (2) using the Amazon EventBridge connection to route data to a cloud EventBus.