Automated Error Reporting

Automated Error Reporting sends an error report to Dimensional Insight when DiveLine clients encounter fatal crashes and some non-fatal errors. After the report-sending code is triggered, if automated reporting is enabled, a report is sent to Dimensional Insight via HTTP. If for some reason the report cannot be sent, no additional error is generated.

NOTE: There is no response about the error from Dimensional Insight. The error information is used to improve the software.

The report includes several pieces of information:

  • The automated reporting id from DiveLine, if used
  • An arbitrary number intended to anonymously but uniquely identify the machine on which the error occurs
  • The product name and version
  • The time of the error
  • The text of the error message
  • A stack trace and thread dump, to help with debugging

The report might also send:

  • The ID and URL of the DivePort page on which the error occurred
  • The name of the marker or model being used
  • Other information identifying the parameters of the error

The report only sends DI-related data. It does not send window contents, model or cBase data, or machine- and user-identifying information. However, some of that information might be present in the text of the error message, which is sent exactly as it is displayed to the user. This feature is not likely to be a privacy or security risk, but for customers for whom privacy or security is legally significant, this feature should not be enabled until Dimensional Insight can guarantee the contents of all error reports.

When using error reporting on UNIX, if the DiveLine server has no proxy between it and www.dimins.com, no other configuration is required.

If the DiveLine server does need to use a proxy to reach www.dimins.com, libcurl 3 or 4 must be installed on the DiveLine server. All UNIX distributions have this available. libcurl is installed by default. DiveLine searches for /usr/lib/libcurl.so or /usr/lib/libcurl.so.4, in that order.

The error reporting then uses the proxy information from the environment. The easiest way to set the proxy is to configure it when starting di-service, as shown below:

$http_proxy=my.proxy.net ./di-service -l <portnum>

where <portnum> is the port where your DiveLine service is installed.