Centrally Managing Rollbar Configuration

To successfully manage Rollbar across an organization, a process is needed to automatically provision, and configure Rollbar for all applications.

By centralizing this process, your organization can help teams to:

Ensure Rollbar is implemented in all new applications
Meet organization data security goals
Meet organization error response best-practices goals

Automate the 3 Rollbar Setup Steps

There are 3 steps to configuring Rollbar for a new application.

Create the Rollbar Project for the application.
Configure and instantiate Rollbar in the application source code.
Complete configuration and verification in the CI/CD process

These steps can be easily automated.

Step 1: Auto-provision Rollbar projects

Auto-provision Rollbar projects using the Rollbar Terraform Provider or the Rollbar REST API

Rollbar & Terraform
Rollbar Terraform Provider
Rollbar API

Step 2: Configure and Instantiate Rollbar

Wrap the Rollbar SDK

For each language that your organization develops create a wrapper class to wrap the Rollbar SDK. This controls direct access to the Rollbar SDK, and ensures that all your team configure Rollbar according to your organizations' requirements.

Include this wrapper in a core library that is included in all applications
Include Rollbar in your organizations' new application templates.
Regularly update to the latest Rollbar SDK version

Implement Data Security Requirements

Your organization may have particular data security requirements. For example

Denying configuration of certain SDK settings
Requiring configuration of certain SDK settings
Implementing extra data scrubbing, including regex matching
Adding extra data to the payload as required by your organization
Including a mechanism receive a notification if teams are inadvertently attempting to send inappropriate data in the payload.

Review the following JavaScript documentation links
Transforming the payload
Ignoring certain items

All Rollbar language SDKs have similar functionality. See the relevant SDK documentation.

Step 3: Rollbar in the CI/CD Process

1. Generate dynamic settings in the CI/CD process

Generate dynamic settings that change for every release during the build or deployment, including:

- Environment 
- code_version
- Custom data fields as required by your organization e.g cluster_id, container_id etc.

2. Verify that Rollbar is configured correctly

Verify that teams are implementing Rollbar according to your organizations' requirements by including verification steps in the CI/CD process. For example:

Unit Tests
Static Code Analysis Tests

3. Notify Rollbar of Deployments

Deploy Tracking
Deploy Tracking API

Other Recommendations

Include your Application Security and Data Security teams in the process
Update the Rollbar SDK to the latest available version for your language/framework
Train end users of Rollbar and application error best-practices for your organization
Automate as much as possible of the Rollbar setup process for new applications, including instantiation of Rollbar at application start-up if possible
Review the process regularly to ensure it still meets your organizations requirements