Technical details and challenges of building Error Merging
Hopefully you've had the chance to try out our latest feature, error merging. We've heard a lot of positive feedback from our users. They're especially excited to be able to easily merge and un-merge related errors. We thought it would be useful to share how the Rollbar team made this happen from a technical standpoint. If you're interested in the nitty-gritty of how we implemented error merging, read on.
I interviewed Todd Dampier, one of the engineers here at Rollbar who was instrumental in making error merging possible, about what was involved in engineering this feature.
How Clubhouse uses Rollbar to monitor JavaScript errors
I'm eager to share an insightful interview our friends at Changelog recently did with Andrew Childs, CTO at Clubhouse and Rollbar power-user. We're big supporters of the Changelog podcast and we asked them, to help us produce a handful of interviews with our customers. It's a fun project that lets us pull back the curtain and learn more about our customers processes for handling errors and deploying code. Read. Listen. Enjoy!
Featured in this interview: Adam Stacoviak, Founder & Chief Editor at Changelog, a podcast on software development and open source. Andrew Childs, CTO of Clubhouse, an easy-to-use project management tool for software teams.
Turning Errors Into Action: How and Why Resolving Errors Matters
Why resolving errors matters?
After fixing a bug, who is responsible for making sure if it really resolves the customer's problem? A lot of companies take a fire-and-forget mentality where the developer makes a code change, and they never think of the problem again until someone complains. Developers often assume that the fix will be deployed with the next release, that the fix will behave the same in production as it does in their development environment, and that it resolves every case uniformly. Only for the most urgent problems will they wait for the fix to hit production and then verify the improvement on the customer's side.
Introducing Error Merging ⎌
We're excited to introduce merging (and un-merging) of errors! Merging errors lets you combine multiple errors into one 'group' for easier management and more accurate metrics. All past and future occurrences of any merged errors will automatically be combined and grouped. Today's merged errors are tomorrow's error groupings. :-)
Merge errors
When you encounter a duplicated error, you'll want to create a new 'group'. Select one or more errors from the same environment in the error Items feed. Slide the toggle in the box above to 'Merge', set appropriate Level, Status, Owner, and Source values, enter a name for the new item, and click 'Merge'. Done, error merge success!
New and improved JavaScript notifier SDK - rollbar.js 2.0
We are excited to announce a major update to our JavaScript notifier SDK in version 2.0. This new version adds support for isomorphic or universal applications, which can run on both the client and the server. It standardizes the configuration and logging across environments, and makes it consistent with notifiers for other languages. Here are the big changes:
Single library for both client and server side
Instacart, leader in grocery delivery, relies on Rollbar for production error monitoring
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Instacart, a leader in the on-demand marketplace, provides one-hour grocery delivery to users of their app and employs thousands of shoppers across the US to support order fulfillment.
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Of the one trillion dollar grocery industry, only 1% of market share currently comes from online grocery sales. As Instacart increasingly captures more of this market, they turn to Rollbar for continuous monitoring of their service’s health.
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With a promise of one-hour delivery, and a shopper workforce relying on their apps, Instacart’s services must be up at all times. Rollbar’s proactive alerting and granular error forensics facilitates the continuous integration and deployment pipeline at the heart of Instacart’s service.
Rollbar allows us to go from alerting to impact analysis and resolution in a matter of minutes. It's fully ingrained into our development cycle and monitoring. Without it we would be flying blind.
Arnaud Ferreri, Engineering Lead for the Consumer Team at Instacart.
Improved PHP error reporting with our latest rollbar-php 1.0 updates
We are excited to announce a significant upgrade to our PHP notifier SDK. This new version will make it much easier for customers to integrate their PHP apps with Rollbar. It uses the latest standards like Composer, proper namespaces, and is more reliable. Here are some of the highlights:
Meet the Rollbar Team - Todd Dampier
Meet Todd Dampier, another member of the Rollbar team! Todd started in late 2016 and we are more than thrilled to have him. Todd came from mLab where he was the founding CTO and has years of experience in his field as a Software Architect and CTO. Todd spent time at MIT, where he completed his undergrad and Masters in Computer Science.