Imagine you’ve been working on a new feature for weeks. Finally—after exhaustive QA and testing, and more late coding sessions than you care to count—you release with a feeling of both accomplishment and relief. Only to be woken up at 3am that something’s wrong. Or worse, you get flooded with customer complaints that it’s not working properly. Well, it’s probably a scenario you don’t need to imagine. Every developer has a version of this story to tell.

We software engineers like to think ourselves unflappable. Consider that we spend most of our days staring at glowing pages of eldritch horror that no mortal was meant to witness. We whisper and type our otherworldly incantations, all the while feeling the hungry gaze of a lurking cross-site scripting bug, or a shadowy use-after-free, or an accidental summoning of ZALGO. (H̨e̛ ̕c͢om͢es, you know.)

You know the feeling. You’ve just deployed a new version to production and are monitoring the Rollbar dashboard for any new errors or looking out for any Slack notifications. You’re keeping an eye on the number of new or reactivated errors, their severity level, and triaging to see which errors need to be assigned and to whom. Now what if you could automate these tasks?

We’re excited to announce that we’ve strengthened our solution for Java Spring. Spring developers can now integrate Rollbar into their Java Spring Boot and Spring Web MVC applications even more quickly and easily. With our new SDK, instrumentation and getting real-time actionable error alerts takes just a few minutes. Spring has consistently been one of the most popular Java frameworks and we want to make sure we’re consistently offering the best possible solution for it.

Velocity, much like the pulse rate or oxygen level of an individual, is an important measure of health for your development team. A low velocity score for recent sprints limits your team's options for delivering value. Sustained failure to deliver to stakeholders can erode trust with those stakeholders quickly. But how do you know exactly what your velocity is and how you can improve it?

Earlier this year, we were invited to Threadup’s wonderful office space in Oakland to be one of the presenters at their quarterly Hackathon. Thredup, a fashion retail marketplace with over 35,000 brands, has been one of our key customers since 2013. We soon realized this wasn’t a normal Hackathon. This hackathon was dedicated to instrumentation and monitoring.

We’re excited to announce our support for GitHub Actions with our new Rollbar Deploy GitHub Action. Teams using GitHub Actions for building their CI/CD pipeline can now easily send deploy information to Rollbar and respond to any new errors quickly.

April 7th, 2020 • By Jon de Andrés Frías In the first part of our series of blog posts on how we remove technical debt using Apache Kafka at Rollbar, we covered some important topics such as: In the second part of the series, we’ll give an overview of how our Kafka consumer works, how we monitor it, and which deployment and release process we followed so we could replace an old system without any downtime.

March 10th, 2020 • By Jon de Andrés Frías In this two-part series of blog posts, we’ll explain how Kafka has helped us in removing parts of our architecture that we consider to be “legacy”. During the development of a project sometimes we need to take decisions on our architecture or software design that may not be the best decisions from a pure and perfectionist technical perspective.

Nearly eight years ago, Cory and I started on a journey to help developers build software quickly and painlessly. As software developers ourselves, we had felt the pain of being afraid to ship and spending late nights tracking down bugs. In 2013, we launched Rollbar into the world so that developers could build software faster, shipping often without fear. These days, lots of people talk about continuous delivery, and nearly all of them focus on automating releases.