September 2017 Summaries

Rollbar has introduced a new feature that allows users to efficiently edit and merge large volumes of items simultaneously, overcoming the previous limitation of handling only 30 items at a time per page. This enhancement enables users to apply changes to all items in a view or those matching a search, similar to Gmail's feature for managing multiple emails. It is particularly beneficial for executing bulk updates, such as assigning numerous items to a developer or merging similar errors from different areas of an application. The feature leverages intelligent fingerprinting rules, ensuring that items need to be merged only once, with new occurrences automatically included in the merged item, thus maintaining a clutter-free view and providing precise metrics on error frequency. This allows users to concentrate on addressing new and significant errors. A 14-day free trial of Rollbar is available for those interested in managing production errors more effectively.

Rollbar has updated its JavaScript and Python libraries to facilitate error monitoring for applications running on AWS Lambda, a popular serverless computing service. Serverless architectures, like those enabled by Lambda, allow for automatic scaling and payment based on actual resource usage rather than pre-allocated compute resources. However, Lambda functions have limitations such as concurrency execution limits, which can lead to function throttling and errors if exceeded. To address these challenges, AWS Lambda uses Cloudwatch for basic monitoring, but Rollbar offers a more comprehensive error tracking solution, providing detailed stack traces, event tracking by browser and IP address, and affected user information. The updated Rollbar.js library now includes a lambdaHandler function, and the pyrollbar library has been enhanced to support Python on Lambda, encouraging users to try these tools and provide feedback or contributions via GitHub.