Ask HN: API with the best integration experience?
Have you ever integrated against a web service where the experience
was memorably delightful? Which service and what made it so?
At my workplace we own/maintain/create a lot of custom small apps for various groups, as well as a fewer larger scale ones (and a few of those are pretty legacy). Prior to Rollbar, we just had random apps kinda using things like NewRelic, but most of the time if we needed to track an error, it meant diving into logs. But, getting everything on Rollbar was an absolute breeze, and the best part (and a sign of a good API/Service) is once the initial setup is done, that’s literally been it, no constant fussing with configs, service changes, it’s been set and forget.
The setup process is more-or-less:
1) Add the app from the web UI 2) Install the gem into the Rails app 3) Setup the token’s for prod/staging environments 4) If the app has a JS frontend, add the JS package 5) Setup the client token 6) Deploy
And after that all errors are being piped into the dashboard, and (almost) out of the box, I’ll be able to see the line it occurred at, the trace back, the IP it came from, the user it occurred with, number of occurrences, and receive notifications when a shitload of errors starts occurring, all from an easy to use dashboard. It’s even a bit better for frontend errors, because you can also see the series of clicks/events the user made leading up to the error.
And a few more clicks in the web UI, you can have it link the errors directly to your source control and issue tracker.
The “RQL” (SQL-like query language) feature initially didn’t seem that useful, but overtime it’s actually come in really handy being able to query the errors in a fairly powerful way.
The documentation is great, they provide official APIs/packages for almost all popular languages & frameworks (with the caveat being focused on web dev).
Definitely a service I’d recommend to any shop that doesn’t have a solid error tracking system in place. I can’t think of a single issue I’ve had with the service in the year+ we’ve been using it.