title: How to log a error to Stackdriver Error Reporting via Stackdriver Logging in Python
body: <p>I've been using Stackdriver Logging for a long time and now I'd like to also take advantage of Error Reporting.  I'd prefer to use Python's logging mechanism and scrape exceptions out of a log file if possible (for various reasons) rather than using the error_reporting library.  That being said, the documentation is very confusing.  For example the documentation says:
  <a href="https://cloud.google.com/error-reporting/docs/setup/compute-engine#log_exceptions" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://cloud.google.com/error-reporting/docs/setup/compute-engine#log_exceptions</a></p>
  <blockquote>
  <p>First, install the fluent-logger-python library:</p>
  <p>sudo pip install google-cloud-error-reporting --upgrade</p>
  </blockquote>
  <p>which leads me to believe that google-cloud-error-reporting is a fork of or related to fluent-logger-python however, when I initialize google-cloud-error-reporting it directly calls out to the GCE metadata server rather than connecting to the local fluentd.  Are these two unrelated packages or is the documentation wrong or misleading?  If I send JSON formatted exceptions to fluentd or to a log file monitored by fluentd will error reporting understand them?</p>
  <p>Thanks for any clarifications</p>