What do you like best about the product?

Real time error reporting. Intelligent clustering and grouping of error occurrences by 10^n. Lots of flexibility in alerting rules.

Team Rollbar--I LOVE you guys and your wonderful service! This review is far too long overdue.

Let me save you a bunch of time and make the decision for you. If you're not already using an error tracking platform, you must. If you're deciding between which services to use, just go with Rollbar, and stop deliberating.

Rollbar is hands-down, THE BEST full-stack application error and exception monitoring/tracking system.

I was an early user and first started using Rollbar in early 2012 (back when it was still called Ratchet.io). Suffice it to say, it has completely transformed and leveled-up the way I build and write applications.

Rollbar is now a must-have for any application I build. TDD? Yeah, could do that, or you can just be more lean and start building, and Rollbar will catch all of your exceptions for you. Large team? Even more so that you need Rollbar, so that you can detect and fix errors before they inconvenience your users.

Here are the reasons for why I think Rollbar is great:

Best thing since sliced bread - For the developers in the late 90's to early 2000's who remember it, just as Firebug and later on Chrome Developer Tools was to JavaScript development, so is Rollbar to development on any stack. Before, with writing JavaScript in Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer 4.0, all you had to go off of was that there was a JS error and the JS on a page was completely broken. Developers familiar with that old debugging technique will shake their heads today--manual binary search, commenting out parts of code until it started working again--those days are gone. Now, with Rollbar, you can know with certainty what parts of your application, down to the specific line(s) of code, are causing the exception.

Rollbar has an exceptional, world-class team. Rollbar is built by engineers, for engineers. I know because I've worked with a few folks at team Rollbar, including the founder/CEO Brian Rue, who has been a mentor and advisor to me at a few startups, and some of my elite former colleagues who were hand-picked to join the Rollbar team. They are extremely talented hackers and engineers.

Rollbar scales, an is extremely reliable. We're not just talking Mickey Mouse pretend scale, but they actually do. Guess what? Unlike most of the rest of the web, they're actually NOT primarily an AWS-based stack (yeah, because AWS outages can cause large chunks of the web to fail). Rollbar is in multiple data centers across the world for improved latency, durability/reliability of data.

Rollbar is extremely easy to integrate and very well documented. There are modules/agents for just about every stack and programming language. A basic setup takes 5-10 minutes.

Rollbar is thoughtful. In the early days of Rollbar, data wasn't scrubbed so potentially you could see sensitive information in the notifications you got. Now, they've significantly improved the reporting agents and UI so that sensitive information can be scrubbed before sending notifications, and additional sensitive/PII fields can be configured in the interface.

Rollbar beats the pants off of their competitors. The primary competitors I'm thinking of are Sentry and New Relic. New Relic is more for infrastructure than application, and often, infrastructure smells and problems are code problems. In terms of budgeting or planning IT spend, I would maximize spending on Rollbar and maybe some more basic infrastructure monitoring like hand-rolled Nagios or even Datadog (which also totally rocks, btw) instead of New Relic. As for comparison with Sentry? See next bullet point.

Rollbar is an adult, whereas Sentry** is a kid. Sentry came out of Disqus, and was built by designer-engineers. Don't get me wrong--they have good engineers, but not as good as Rollbar's. I don't care if Sentry is more popular atm or if the UI looks better; I want to know that I can have absolute confidence in my error tracking platform and sleep better at night. If error tracking services were facial hair, Rollbar would be a full, lush beard, and Sentry would be the teenage kid with sporadic prickly hairs here and there and some peach fuzz on the side. Rollbar doesn't rate-limit by default, which means you get all of your exception occurrences notified and tracked. It is 4K Ultra HD, if you will. (Though, to help manage costs and temper noise, you can set custom rate limits per API key--this is so powerful!) Sentry rate-limits by default, resulting in "sampling" error tracking which isn't full coverage and leaves you erroneously thinking that your app is in better health than it actually is.

Rollbar is "multi-tenant" (similar to GitHub) in the sense that you can have one user account affiliated with multiple organizations and projects. This is a nice added convenience.

Rollbar is enterprise-ready and has on-premise deployments.

As of this review, it's 2016--why aren't you using Rollbar yet? If you're still trying to hand-roll your own error logging system, I would seriously question you or your company's technical competence.

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing, this software is the-bomb-diggity-dot-com.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

With Rollbar, you are able to discover and fix errors before your users do. This is a huge business value.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Rollbar has an excellent freemium model. Once you start using it, you can set up rate limits to not trip into higher usage tiers or overage costs.

Any software company that has any serious plans of scaling should implement Rollbar ASAP.

What do you like best about the product?

Its hastle free = once setup you know you can come in and check your emails/chat channels for any hidden issues in your software. Integration with third parties.
Can see who pushed/deployed

What do you dislike about the product?

The only thing I can think of is a slightly outdated UI - saying that I rely on the notifications 90% of the time.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Monitoring applications in production environments.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Integrates easily with email and Slack - there are alot more options, but these are the ones our team uses.

What do you like best about the product?

Rollbar has got some really powerful and fantastic features for getting notified whenever there is a bug present in my app which my customer/user has experienced. It gets integrated in my codebase very easily and supports most of the leading programming languages like .NET, PHP, Javascript, and Python. Its dashboard allows me to understand what exactly is happening in the code and I can easily organize error traces to find the line of code which generated the error. I can customize the email so that I will get notifications about the errors which are of high priority and needs to be resolved urgently.

What do you dislike about the product?

The main concern is about the pricing Rollbar has offered via its plans. It is on the higher side when compared with other Crash Reporting tools. It doesn’t provide any context for few of the errors generated due to Javascript although it affects my app when user is trying to login to the app.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I have been using Rollbar to get notified about my app’s performance bugs instantly and it has 5 severity levels for getting notifications. The least level is Debug and the highest level is Critical, which helps in diagnosing the bugs and resolving them according to their priority. Using the dashboard, I am able to view the history details about the error like arguments associated with the error, when exactly did the problem came into the app, which browsers/OS was affected, etc.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Rollbar will be really useful for the front end error reporting for your app and will keep you notified about the bugs affecting your app. Also the integration is superfast and simple to implement.

What do you like best about the product?

Definitely Rollbar is a top notch crash reporting tool and requires just 2 steps to be implemented in the code for integrating its services with my app.

It has a lightning speed to go to the line of code which has resulted in the error just by double clicking on it. The dashboard makes it possible to organize the error traces to get detailed analysis of the Prioritized issues first.

I has helped me in keeping the production instance error free with its alerts and notifications in real time giving detailed traces and error reports, so that I can find those errors and fix them before it affects my app users. Reports can be sorted out with respect to the number of affected users for each bug.

What do you dislike about the product?

Although I have not used all its features, there seems to be an issue with the mute functionality and is not working most of the time. Also I would like to see a help document from the support team to specify the most important features as it is not feasible to understand and use all the features from the dashboard.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I deployed Rollbar in my app around 6 months ago in both the instances i.e. test instance and production instance to keep a track of all errors and crashes being experienced by customers. Thus it makes it easy to find the issues quickly which we weren’t able to find earlier as it took a long time to figure out the root cause of the crash.

Rollbar has benefitted us in capturing the JavaScript errors at the client side and keep the production instance bug free.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

It will be helpful in providing reports about front end errors and also the price is reasonable when compared to its excellent features. A lot of API are provided for catching server side errors and is worth trying.

What do you like best about the product?

I like Rollbar because it allows me to collect information about my app’s error reports which includes requested parameters, affected users, stack traces and URL information. It is very easy to implement and integrate Rollbar in my code with the help of their API. What I really like about Rollbar is that I can examine and analyze specific errors experienced by the users quickly. It can also provide detailed information about all the errors experienced by a particular user. This allows me to provide timely support to that particular user and reach out to them whenever that error occurs to resolve it.

I can also setup customized email notifications for specific errors which I think will have serious impact and should be resolved quickly. Thus, only those notifications would be sent to me reducing the overall stress about dealing with every single error even if that is not important at that particular moment.

What do you dislike about the product?

There are tons of features present in Rollbar and when I first got a glimpse of the dashboard I found that some of the features were not important to me. Thus, Rollbar should create some documentation to highlight the basic features which are needed to test your services and rest would be additional features which one can try.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The User Interface is capable of organizing the error traces in a very efficient manner and this makes it useful for me to examine the errors and work on them easily. Just by clicking on the error, I can navigate to the line in my code which generated that error. So, it is pretty fast and reliable for error reporting.

I always use it to analyze the errors by sorting them with occurrence, Operating system, internet browser, and host application for quick analysis.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

It is definitely a very good tool for a QA tester and can be used as a reporting tool to debug the information.

What do you like best about the product?

Easy to setup, simple to understand emails, good error reporting. Free service too.

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing right now, it's a pretty good product.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Catching errors quickly and responding to them.

What do you like best about the product?

It always keeps me up to date on any errors afflicting my system. It warns me of any new errors and helps me to identify trends with possible edge cases not caught in my unit testing.

What do you dislike about the product?

It could have a little more metrics. Some competitors report on more environmental metrics which can sometimes help to put errors into context.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Error monitoring and alerting. It helps the entire team keep up to date with the health of the production environment.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Just try it out, it's an amazing piece of software and easy to get started with.

What do you like best about the product?

Rollbar features a lot of platform integrations, so I could see using this with my backend API as well. Error aggregation is a must given the volume of errors that might come through. The interface is fairly extensive (esp. coming from Honeybadger) and the different environments setting is useful.

What do you dislike about the product?

In an Ember app, it's not quite plug-and-play. Errors that are triggered after page load don't seem to be caught at all (although errors on initial page load are), maybe it has to do with the event loop.

I'm also having difficulty setting up source maps: I configured the correct settings and confirmed that we upload/link to source maps in production, but Rollbar has not picked it up. Manually setting the "code_version" flag isn't a big deal in a templating language, but it seems like this could/should be inferred from the cache-busted script URLs or a SHA of the index page (since Ember apps leverage revision hashes on all assets).

It's minor, but I didn't see Pivotal Tracker or Slack integration—I particularly like the former integration from HoneyBadger, and would like "realtime updates" through Slack instead of a barrage of emails.

Last, the error aggregation algorithm seems a bit fidgety—might have been due to me trying to get source maps working, but super similar errors weren't grouped if the code was slightly revised or had slightly differing line number in the stack trace. I would personally like an option to aggregate errors over differing deploy revisions to catch similar errors across deploys since it's unlikely we would fix every bug in one deploy (we use a continuous integration strategy).

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Deploying a large scale frontend app, currently without error monitoring so it's hard to track obscure bugs. Historically, frontend error tracking tooling has always been "hand-tied" due to the limited info in window.onerror, but as the browser APIs improve it has become feasible to track frontend errors.

What do you like best about the product?

My favorite aspects of this software is the adaptability between different programing languages and the automatic notifications.

What do you dislike about the product?

The software is mainly suited for the smaller business, which isn't really a complaint, but a cloud based software would be better suited for the needs of the many.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Error tracking and support

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Test it out and provide feedback to the developers. Freemium software is a great option.

What do you like best about the product?

It instantly reports all the exceptions that occurs in my ruby server apps. I like it is by default awesome, but as well let's you log and custom report anything you like by the use of an API. You can also add extra parameters to associated to each exception.
The pricing is among the best of all as of early 2016.

What do you dislike about the product?

The UI needs lots of improvements. It's sad because the product features are amazing, I'd make a refresh of the UX/UI with a add more real time approach.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use it to monitor my startup backend.