INVALID_ARGUMENT (400 error) when calling Stackdriver Error Reporting API

Question

When trying to invoke the Stackdriver Error Reporting API (via the API explorer or via the Client-Side JavaScript library), I receive the following error:

Request:

{ "message" : "test" }

Response:

{
  "error": {
    "code": 400,
    "message": "Request contains an invalid argument.",
    "status": "INVALID_ARGUMENT"
  }
}

The Stackdriver Error Reporting API is enabled and I have Owner rights to the App Engine project.

Is the API simply not functional? If I'm doing something wrong, can someone try to help?

Answer 1

The documentation for reporting events says that a ServiceContext is required.

If you're only sending a message (not a stacktrace / exception) you'll need to include a context with a reportLocation as well. This is noted in the documentation of the message field, but it's not obvious.

The following works from the API explorer:

{
 "context": {
  "reportLocation": {
   "functionName": "My Function"
  }
 },
 "message": "error message",
 "serviceContext": {
  "service": "My Microservice",
 }
}

You might be interested in the docs on How Error are Grouped too.

FWIW, I work on this product and I think the error message is too generic. The problem is (?) that the serving stack scrubs the message unless they're annotated as being for public consumption. I'll chase that down.