Filter or Ignore Errors from Bots

Rollbar provides a few ways to filter or ignore errors that happen in requests made by bots.

Using Custom Grouping

You can create a Custom Fingerprinting rule to group all errors from known bots into their own Item in Rollbar, separate from your other data. Then mute that item or change its severity.

Here's an example custom grouping rule to ignore client-side JavaScript errors that are caused by the Baidu spider:

[
   {
     "condition": {
       "all": [
         {
           "eq": "browser",
            "path": "platform"
         },
         {
           "eq": "browser-js",
            "path": "framework"
        },
        {
         "eq": "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html)",
          "path": "client.javascript.browser"
        }
      ]
    },
    "fingerprint": "Baiduspider js error",
    "title": "Baiduspider js error"
  }
]

We use this ourselves: these errors are still tracked in case we need them, but they stay out of sight in day-to-day use.

Filtering Client-Side

If you would rather ignore them completely, you can filter them out before they are sent to the Rollbar API in the first place. For example, for client-side JavaScript:

_rollbarConfig = {
  // current config...
  checkIgnore: function(isUncaught, args, payload) {
     if (window.navigator.userAgent && window.navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Baiduspider') !== -1) {
       // ignore baidu spider
       return true;
     }
     // no other ignores
     return false;
   }
}

Some of our other libraries don't implement checkIgnore yet. Please check out the docs for your SDK to see if checkIgnore is implemented, and open an issue on the appropriate repo in GitHub if you'd like checkIgnore in an SDK that hasn't implemented it yet.