Rollbar Handbook
In this guide we will cover the basic concepts behind Rollbar, show you how to manage errors in the system, and give general guidance for Point Guards who need to curate messages in the system.
In order to manage errors in Rollbar you will need an account. If you have recently joined, or have never had to manage errors before, ask Forrest for access.
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 errors. 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.
When you first login to Rollbar you should see a page that looks like this:
This is the Rollbar dashboard and it shows you basic trends about errors for a particular project in our infrastructure. From the dashboard you have the following basic actions you can perform:
- Switch between project dashboards (API, shiva, etc.)
- View trend information for project errors
- Dig deeper into a particular error
- Monitor account usage