Issue
I am currently using Sentry to monitor application logs and track errors in our app. While reviewing the error reports, I often come across entries labeled as "Unhandled Error." However, it is unclear whether these errors actually caused an application crash or if they were logged without affecting the app's stability.
Applies To
- All SaaS Customers and Self-Hosted Users
- Error Monitoring
- Release Health
Resolution
In Sentry, “unhandled” doesn’t always mean that the exception caused the application to terminate. It generally means that Sentry detected the exception outside of a standard try/catch flow, so it was unhandled in the application code at the time it occurred. However, depending on how your runtime (e.g., Xamarin, Unity, .NET MAUI) and the underlying OS handle unhandled exceptions, an unhandled error may or may not force an immediate crash.
To get a more accurate picture, you should look at the following indicators:
- Check if the error is marked as "fatal" in the event details. Fatal errors are more likely to have caused a crash
- Look for the
handledattribute on errors. Unhandled errors will have this set tofalse - Review the mechanism type of the exception. This can give you more context about how the error was captured
It is worth noting that we are aware of this, and are looking for an improved behavior which we are tracking here.