Setting Up Error Tracking (Rollbar) for Your Web Application
Rollbar differs from Sentry and Bugsnag with emphasis on deploy tracking and RQL (Rollbar Query Language) — SQL-like language for error analysis. Useful when you need quick answers to "how many unique users got this error this week" or "does error growth correlate with a specific deploy".
Free plan: 5000 events/month.
Installation PHP / Laravel
composer require rollbar/rollbar-laravel
.env:
ROLLBAR_TOKEN=your_post_server_item_token
ROLLBAR_LEVEL=error
ROLLBAR_ENVIRONMENT=production
Service provider registers automatically. Rollbar captures Laravel exceptions, logs, and custom events.
RQL Queries
-- Errors by deployment
SELECT count(*) as error_count, environment
FROM items WHERE status = 'active'
GROUP BY environment
-- Error trend
SELECT date_trunc('day', timestamp) as date, count(*)
FROM items
WHERE created_at > now() - interval '7 days'
GROUP BY date
-- Impact: unique users affected
SELECT count(DISTINCT user_id) as affected_users
FROM items WHERE status = 'active'
Timeline
Basic setup: 1-2 hours. Full integration with deploy tracking and RQL dashboards: 3-4 hours.