Rollbar Helps Cvent Streamline and Accelerate Issue Resolution for its 1,500+ Person Tech Team

Goal

Find and Resolve Errors Faster

Cvent, the industry-leading meetings, events, and hospitality technology provider, offers the world’s most comprehensive event marketing and management platform, helping its more than 30,000 customers execute hundreds of thousands of events worldwide every year. The events hosted on Cvent’s platform range from a couple hundred to tens of thousands of attendees, so delivering a world-class product that can effectively support each event’s unique requirements is critical.

Cvent has an integrated platform with multiple solutions to help event organizers optimize the entire event management value chain including online event registration, venue selection, event marketing, virtual, hybrid, and onsite solutions, and attendee engagement. Behind the scenes, keeping all these products and microservices running smoothly is extremely complex.

Before deploying Rollbar, Cvent’s engineering teams would meet regularly to determine what information would be useful to capture in logs. Then, they would spend development time building systems and workflows to record that information, process it, and make it searchable. The team used a combination of custom coding and various software to piece together an error monitoring solution.

Integrating these disparate software systems posed additional challenges and required ongoing engineering maintenance.

When errors occurred, the engineers would have to dig into the logs to identify the issue. The process was time-consuming, clunky, and didn’t guarantee the necessary contextual information surrounding an error would be captured. “It takes a lot of time to build these systems manually, and there is guesswork involved for what to track,” said Daniil Rohov, Lead Application Support Engineer at Cvent. Resolving issues in production was particularly cumbersome since major bugs would often require starting an entirely new development cycle to address.

By working with Rollbar, the Cvent team hoped to eliminate the ongoing, upfront development work, freeing up developer capacity to focus on new product features. The team also hoped to reduce release risk and accelerate time to resolution for known issues.

Strategy

Deploy Rollbar for QA Testing, Release, and Production Error Monitoring

Real-time production error monitoring

Cvent deployed Rollbar on the company’s mobile app and engagement products, and quickly recognized the value of real-time production error monitoring. Since Rollbar captures all errors and displays them in a single interface, grouped by error, it was easy for the Cvent team to assess the severity of each issue as it arose — and prioritize it accordingly.

Cvent also has many microservices, which can make error identification more complex. Rollbar provides valuable context around each error, letting the team know which product, microservice or application the error is tied to, as well as where the error originated This greatly reduces the amount of code developers need to sift through in order to identify and resolve an issue. “What I like is that with Rollbar we can very easily track where errors are happening: what environments or code, and also with what kind of service.

In the world of microservices, where we have potentially five different things that have to happen to make a single feature work, Rollbar lets you quickly identify which is the root of the problem, tag it, and advise the developers which subset of code they need to investigate,” Rohov said.

Rollbar’s ability to pinpoint the part of an API call that generates an error is particularly useful for production monitoring, given Cvent’s volume of microservices. “Rollbar makes it easy to reproduce the issue so we can help our developers fix it. For example, if there is an error with an API call, Rollbar shows exactly the part of the API call that led to that error, so you can retrigger it. This is really helpful and saves a lot of time,” continued Rohov.

Release monitoring

“Rollbar’s technology is also being leveraged by other teams within the organization for additional use cases, including release monitoring. The company’s release teams use Rollbar to monitor which errors are new and when they began, helping triangulate which release caused the problem and dramatically reducing the amount of code that must be reviewed to fix an issue.

As the leader in this space, we are constantly updating and enhancing our products to ensure we continue to provide our customers with bestin-class support and solutions. With Rollbar, our developers can start investigating any issues in realtime, which often allows us to catch any problems before they can impact our customers – and that really is the biggest win of all.”

By tracking errors in real-time the team could give releases a “green light” before pushing code into full-scale production. “That definitely gives us more confidence to know that each release meets both our high standards, and those of our customers,” Rohov explained.

QA testing

Cvent’s QA teams are also using Rollbar to help ensure successful testing earlier in the software development lifecycle. The QA team uses Rollbar to monitor errors proactively and ensure major issues are addressed prior to release. Rollbar’s comprehensive monitoring also helps the Cvent team catch smaller, less obvious errors early in the development process – which helps the team avoid production delays later on.

Results

Cvent has seen numerous benefits from working with Rollbar, including:

Lower error escape rates to production

Rollbar lets Cvent’s QA team monitor errors while testing, ensuring any issues are resolved prior to release and lowering the average error escape rate.

More confident releases

Cvent’s teams can release updates more frequently at lower risk, knowing any issues will be flagged immediately. Because Rollbar flags both major and minor bugs during the QA process, Cvent is more confident than ever in its releases.

Faster time to resolution

Since Rollbar contextualizes the root cause of each error, Rohov can quickly mobilize the right team to debug the issue. Charlie Amadieh, Senior Director of Engineering at Cvent said, “Rollbar captures all the relevant information for you without any additional work. I can quickly identify new errors happening in the system, prioritize their importance, and address them efficiently.”

Better customer experience

Rollbar tracks production errors in real-time, empowering the Cvent team to fix them immediately — before the issue can impact its customers. Cvent was even recently awarded “Best Overall Event Management Platform” at the industry’s prestigious MarTech Awards for the strength of its platform and customer experience.

Greater development capacity

Rollbar’s out-of-the-box solution helps Cvent throughout the software development lifecycle, freeing up the company’s engineers to focus on the company’s product roadmap instead of on building error monitoring systems or troubleshooting errors in production. “With more than 20 years of industry experience, our customers have come to expect the best from Cvent – and we have an extremely robust roadmap to deliver on that expectation,” Ahmadieh said. “Our ability to free up developers’ time to focus on new product developments instead of error monitoring has been critical to our success.”