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Fast, Accurate and Powerful Item Search

Fast, Accurate and Powerful Item Search

We’ve overhauled the search backend that powers the Item List UI and Item Search API. Item Search is now far more powerful, working with custom fields and nearly all the data you send Rollbar. Searches return quickly and return the results you'd expect.

What's new?

With the new backend, Item Search has:

Better Performance

  • Faster performance on most searches, especially when a date range is selected.

Better Accuracy

  • Item statistics (e.g. count, unique IPs, chart over time) in search results reflect occurrence-level filters. (Previously, occurrence-level filters like context, person or host would filter items but not affect statistics; now, it works as expected.)
  • Many bugs solved, including host search not working and unexpected behavior on context search.

More Search Features

  • Nearly all fields are now indexed and searchable, including key-value pairs within custom data, request params, and trace locals.
  • Total result count is now available for large projects, for all searches covering <= 30 days of data.

What can you do with it?

Now, available in the Item List UI or Item Search API, you can:

  • Find the top errors affecting a particular URL, route name, or email domain
  • Find the top errors, filtering on custom data
  • Get fast results (a few seconds) to searches across 1000s of projects and billions of occurrences
  • Count the number of unique Rollbar items, so you can track your progress to Rollbar Zero

All search filters are supported in Saved Views, so you can easily save and share complex searches. For example, internally at Rollbar, we used Saved Views to quickly drill into specific areas of the system (a combination of projects, environments, and frameworks) and to view overall system health (all production services, error/critical, last 7 days, sorted by total).

How to get started

Log in to Rollbar, click Items. Try finding the top items affecting a url containing the string "subscription":

request_url:%subscription%

The resulting items, counts, and sparkline charts are all filtered by what you searched for.

Searching Custom Fields

Consider a custom field named "key". Custom fields can be searched as follows:

custom[key]:value

Most fields sent to Rollbar are now indexed and searchable. Full search field listing is available in the Rollbar Documentation.

Case Sensitivity and Wildcards

Case-insensitive prefix search is the default. Case sensitive is available via exact match.

To use exact match, place the value in quotes:

custom[key]:"value"

Wildcards are supported using % to match any number of characters or _ to match a single character:

custom[key]:%va_ue%

Wildcard characters can be escaped with \, e.g., find all items with a request URL containing a % character:

request_url:%\%%

Learn more

Check out our Search Documentation for details on search options and available search terms. Need to add custom data? Follow our guide on Adding Additional Data to the Occurrence.

Related Resources

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