Error message truncation may be too strict

[remcowesterhoud]

Describe the bug

In #11460 we've implemented a truncation on error messages. This was done to prevent error messages from exceeding the maximum message size. Currently the messages are limited to 500 characters.

We've had a support case asking us where the remainder of the error message has gone. 500 characters may be too strict. A regular stack trace will quickly exceed this limit.

Generally users would have logging on their workers which should be able to show them the full message. Obviously this isn't visible in Operate and is an extra step for users. If we could provide a better UX by increasing this limit we should consider this.

We could also think about making this limit configurable.

To Reproduce

Throw an error on a Job with > 500 characters.

Expected behavior

I can see more than just the first 500 characters of my error.

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https://jira.camunda.com/browse/SUPPORT-17090

[korthout]

ZPA triage:

• request makes sense
• we could easily increase the limit much higher (e.g. 10k) without exceeding MAX_MESSAGE_SIZE
• we could also consider ways to make this more dynamic, but this is more complex
• the simple fix has our preference and could be backported to all supported versions easily
• we'll mark this a bug
• could be a good first issue for new onboarders

[akkie]

The support also pointed me to this issue. I work for a consulting company and we helped a large German corporation to implement Camunda Platform 8 for their processes. In all our presentations, we showed how easy it is for the DevOps guys to see the errors directly in Operate instead of searching through the logs. Of course this was not the only selling point, but it was a feature that everyone really liked.

I understand the problem for truncating the message, but as @korthout mentioned, if it's ok to increase the limit, it would be really appreciated, because currently with the 500 chars limit, it's not really useful. For us 10k would be more as enough.

[korthout]

Thanks for sharing @akkie. It's very helpful to understand such perspectives 🙇

[aleksander-dytko]

Another Support issue about this: https://jira.camunda.com/browse/SUPPORT-17503

It would be great to finish this soon. Thank @nicpuppa for taking care of this one 🚀