Rollbar releases Adaptive Alerts feature

Rollbar, provider of real-time error monitoring Software as a Service, has announced Adaptive Alerts, a new feature that adds to its reliable, informative, and actionable alerts about unexpected issues in monitored applications and services. Rollbar’s error monitoring is state of the art and provides highly accurate alerts with fewer false positives and false negatives than competitors. It integrates with many popular developer tools to make workflow and the adoption of error monitoring easier. The new feature, Adaptive Alerts uses anomaly detection to learn the standard behavior of enterprise applications, and alerts developers about atypical exception rates, reducing unwanted noise, with zero ongoing configuration.

Rollbar releases Adaptive Alerts feature that lets Developers Focus on Important Alerts

"Error alerting is important, but historically developers have had to deal with a lot of noise. Adaptive Alerts is the next generation of trendline alerting in Rollbar. Compared to the previous generation, which Rollbar customers know as the 10^nth Occurrence and High Occurrence Rate, Adaptive Alerts sends 86% fewer notifications, thanks to automatically adjusting thresholds, and a broader exception-level view that effectively detects application-level trends," said Brian Rue, CEO, and co-founder at Rollbar.

Competing solutions alert on fixed error rate thresholds, or focus on detecting anomalies across metrics and events. However, Rollbar’s Adaptive Alerts detect anomalies by error exception type, allowing it to be highly reliable with less noise. This is important because enterprise applications often have a large number of unique errors that are open, but not a priority to fix as long as they occur at a low rate. Developers and SREs want to know when such errors become more active than usual so that they can resolve them if needed. But alerts based on fixed error thresholds generate too much noise and waste valuable developer time.

“We quickly realized we were discovering things we were not discovering using thresholds,” said Hector Villafuerte, ops engineer at mobile language learning platform company Duolingo.

The Rollbar algorithm is continuously trained using two weeks of historical data for each product/application. After analyzing a project’s historical data, Adaptive Alerts determines a baseline, monitors the exceptions rate continuously, and sends an alert within minutes when it detects something significant. Users can adjust the minimum exception rate to alert and sensitivity to fine-tune what constitutes an anomaly. Ethan Salisbury, the principal software engineer at health and wellness company Plexus Worldwide, commented that “Adaptive Alerts grouped errors together in a way that I couldn’t have.”

Adaptive Alerts is automatically available to Rollbar’s Advanced and Enterprise plan customers. Rollbar has helped more than 5,000 customers and 28,000 paid users process more than 100 billion errors, resulting in 4x faster debugging and a 9x increase in releases per year. The Continuous Code Improvement Platform has been a game-changer for Rollbar customers. With Rollbar, customers can resolve errors within minutes, significantly increasing team productivity.