Support for providing ExceptionTelemetry without actual/original exception object?

[sopelt]

Hello, I was wondering if AI could provide support for tracking exceptions (creating an exception telemetry/exception details) without having the actual exception object instance. When using AI in different layers of an app (asp.net (core), JS ...) and adding a small IoT component it would be nice to unify the logs in a central system (AI).
This could work by serializing traces and exceptions, sending them to a blob/webapp/function/... and moving them to AI from there.
As ExceptionTelemetry requires an exception one could implement an exception type that just provides the serialized message and stacktrace but that loses the exception type.

Having a proper API for this use case (without exposing ExceptionDetails?) could be interesting if other people face this use-case as well.

[SergeyKanzhelev]

Thanks for your proposal. We will likely implement it in the version after the next

[sopelt]

That is good to hear. Right now we can put StackTrace, Message, ClassName .. in custom dimensions/Properties within the ExceptionTelemetry but it would preferable to track them the same way as service-side exceptions.
My idea with implementing an exception type overriding StackTrace fell short as AI seems to invoke some code for handling stack traces that does not rely on the properties but works with the underlying fields.

[dnelly]

I have a similar issue

The need:
My app emits exceptions and I want to have the exceptions recorded in Application Insights along with all attributes like inner exception objects and stack traces. However, I need to censor some of the values in the exceptions without dropping the attribute altogether (just change the value to something like XX-XX-XX).

The attempt:
I implemented a telemetry processor that applies the following pattern.

1. Identify that the telemetry item is an ExceptionTelemetry item
2. Serialize the ExceptionTelemetry to JSON
3. Mutate the relevant values (without dropping the attributes altogether)
4. Deserialize JSON back to an instance of an ExceptionTelemetry object and overwrite the original item

Once again, no attribute is dropped from the exception.

Strange result:
The mutated exceptions make it to Application Insights and he can also see them in Application Analytics, but very strangely, the mutated exceptions no longer have a message and stack trace attributes in the exception and inner exception. If I disable the custom telemetry processor then the full exception makes it to AI without losing any attributes. Also, serialization/deserialization of the object works fine. This can also be observed from the output window in Visual Studio when in a F5 scenario.

[dnelly]

Any updates on this?

[kunalspathak]

I am facing similar problem that @dnelly is having. Basically I want to record an app exception into AI, but the exception might have PII information that I don't want to send. The approach I am taking currently is extract out interesting non-PII information from the exception objects (this will not be as simple as it sounds), create a new ExceptionTelemetry() object and populate it with relevant information before calling TraceException() passing the newly created ExceptionTelemetry object.

[SergeyKanzhelev]

@kunalspathak we are open for contributions. Otherwise I cannot give an ETA for the fix. The only workaround for now is to convert ExceptionTelemetry into TraceTelemetry by serializing exception into text manually.