Just because we do something one way, doesn’t always mean it is the right way … or even the best way.

As long as I can remember, I’ve included log messages in my code to provide run-time insight into what the code is really doing. From developers running locally all the way to the eyes of a production support engineer, these extra lines of code are meant to help troubleshoot unexpected scenarios.

The problem with this approach is that the entire process seems a bit off. Something unexpected happens, so we struggle to locate the root cause using some logging solution, tracing the log messages and stack trace backwards trying to determine where the reality differed from the expectations. This can take a lot of effort and time — and all at the price of impatient customers (both internal and external) wondering why things are not working properly.

When I started reading about Rollbar, I began to wonder if my years of doing something one way wasn’t the right way after all. So I decided to try out Rollbar in a Java/Spring project to see if it offered a better way than my current process.

What Is Rollbar?

Rollbar provides a different approach to application monitoring. It’s focused on not only agile development and continuous delivery, but on providing real-time visibility into your application without having to refresh cluttered log screens and mine mountains of data. Furthermore, the data that arrives into the Rollbar dashboard not only delivers on the metrics expected by production support and DevOps teams, but also links to the underlying source code — even to the point where existing tickets can be linked to an unexpected event … or a new ticket can be created directly from Rollbar itself.

So when Rollbar reports an error, you’re often just a click away from the offending source code and creating a new ticket.

I feel like this is the point where I start to write “but wait … there’s more.” Honestly, there really is more, but now is a good time to stop going down the marketing path and actually do something with Rollbar itself.

#monitoring #logging #programming #software-development #java #spring #spring-boot #performance