July 2019 Summaries

Exception monitoring tools like Rollbar have significantly transformed how development teams handle and manage exceptions by extending the activity beyond individual developers to entire teams, thereby enhancing application quality and transparency across all environments, from development to production. Rollbar's implementation ensures better visibility and input in the development process, supporting continuous delivery and canary releases by providing crucial data for decision-making, like when to roll back a release due to a production exception. The tool helps maintain environment parity, as discrepancies between development and production setups can cause issues, which Rollbar helps identify and mitigate. It also enhances developer accountability by offering key performance indicators that directly relate code quality to user experience, and it improves communication between QA, Ops, and developers by providing detailed exception data. Additionally, Rollbar's monitoring capabilities aid in managing serverless functions like Azure WebJobs and AWS Lambda, ensuring that any issues are promptly detected and addressed, thus maintaining consistency and quality across all environments.

Uploading source maps to Rollbar is crucial for debugging production code that has been optimized using build tools like webpack, which can obscure the original source code structure due to minification and bundling. Source maps facilitate the translation of error stack traces from the optimized code back to the original source code, enhancing the ability of developer tools to accurately pinpoint errors. While it is technically possible to provide Rollbar with source maps by hosting them on a production server, this method is not recommended due to security concerns. A more secure and reliable approach is to upload source maps to Rollbar before deployment, ensuring that the source code remains protected while still allowing Rollbar to effectively map errors to the original code. The article outlines the process of configuring and scripting the upload of source maps to Rollbar, providing a practical guide for developers looking to maintain robust error tracking without compromising code privacy.

Continuous delivery (CD) reduces the cost, time, and risk of deploying updates by allowing fast incremental changes, but monitoring these deployments is crucial to ensure user satisfaction. Rollbar is an effective tool for error monitoring, alerting developers to new errors post-deployment, and identifying the specific deployment and code changes responsible. This capability accelerates troubleshooting and problem resolution. The integration of Jenkins, an open-source server for automating continuous integration and delivery, with Rollbar is demonstrated using a Java-based pet clinic project. Jenkins is configured to notify Rollbar of each new deployment, allowing Rollbar to track and identify errors efficiently. The setup includes creating a Jenkins job, integrating Rollbar's notifier SDK, and ensuring source control integration to link errors directly to the relevant source code. By simulating errors and using Rollbar's dashboard, developers can quickly trace errors back to their source, helping maintain application reliability and improve customer experience.