Heartbeats Troubleshooting

Common problems and how to fix them

Here you will a list of common problems and how to solve them.

Timeout when creating heartbeats through Elmah.Io.Client

If you experience a timeout when calling the Healthy, Degraded, or Unhealthy method, you may want to adjust the default HTTP timeout. Elmah.Io.Client has a default timeout of 5 seconds to make sure that logging to elmah.io from a web application won't slow down the web app too much in case of slow response time from the elmah.io API. While 99.9% of the requests to the elmah.io API finish within this timeout, problems with Azure, the network connection, and a lot of other issues can happen.

Since heartbeats typically run outside the scope of a web request, it's safe to increase the default HTTP timeout in this case:

var api = ElmahioAPI.Create("API_KEY", new ElmahIoOptions
{
    Timeout = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 30)
});

The example set a timeout of 30 seconds.

SocketException when creating heartbeats through Elmah.Io.Client

A System.Net.Sockets.SocketException when communicating with the elmah.io API can mean multiple things. The API can be down or there's network problems between your machine and the API. Increasing the timeout as shown in the previous section should be step one. If you still experience socket exceptions, it might help to implement retries. This can be done by setting up a custom HttpClient:

builder.Services
    .AddHttpClient("elmahio")
    .AddPolicyHandler(HttpPolicyExtensions
        .HandleTransientHttpError()
        .WaitAndRetryAsync(3, i => TimeSpan.FromSeconds(i)));

The AddPolicyHandler is available when installing the Microsoft.Extensions.Http.Polly NuGet package. Next, create the elmah.io client with the custom HttpClient:

var httpClient = httpClientFactory.CreateClient("elmahio");
var elmahIoClient = ElmahioAPI.Create("API_KEY", options, httpClient);

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