Rollbar Handbook

Concepts

Rollbar is a essentially a logging system that records errors, tallies them, and can be used to understand the state of our system from the perspective of failure scenarios. It also includes tools that allow us to watch, resolve, and change the criticality of error messages. By using it correctly to manage the errors being reported it grants us the ability to quick identify, track, and fix errors in our production system.

In order to begin managing our error reporting through rollbar, you must first understand the different levels of criticality it provides us. The levels, in order of priority, are:

• Critical: Fatal errors that cause servers (or the entire app) to go down; these should be addressed immediately.
• Error: Unexpected failures; these should be addressed soon.
• Warn: Expected failures; these can usually be ignored.
• Info: Information about the service; these should never be reported.

Notice that these levels are very similar to that of our production logging. This is no accident, as rollbar is essentially a log tallying system that provides a focused view on failure scenarios. Keep this in mind when managing errors, as it will help you make decisions on which errors should be marked as warnings, and which ones should be kept at error or critical.