Rollbar Lines · How it works
A scoped ticket goes in, and a tested, reviewed pull request comes out.
Your team hands Rollbar Lines a scoped ticket the same way they would hand it to an engineer. The rest happens on your own systems, the same way on the first ticket and the two-hundredth.
A scoped ticket, assigned from your tracker
A comment from someone you allow starts the run.
A fresh virtual machine on your systems
Your development environment, your tests, your linters.
A pull request with a written report
What it changed, what it ran, what it did not verify.
Your engineer reviews and merges
Rollbar Lines has no path to your main branch.
How it works
Every ticket takes the same eight steps.
1
You assign a ticket
A comment on the ticket, from someone you have allowed, starts the run.
2
Rollbar Lines boots a fresh virtual machine
Each job gets its own virtual machine on your own systems, with your full development environment on it.
3
It writes the change
It works on its own branch and follows the operating rules written for that repository.
4
It runs your tests
It runs your test suite, your linters, and your checks. If the environment is broken, it says so instead of guessing.
5
It opens a pull request
It attaches a written report of what it changed, what it ran, and what it did not verify.
6
A second virtual machine reviews it
The review runs as its own job on its own virtual machine. It posts inline comments and a statement of what it did not check before anyone on your team spends time on it.
7
Your team approves and merges
A person reads the diff, the report, and the review, and merges from your code host. Rollbar Lines has no path to your main branch.
8
It verifies the fix in production
Ask it whether the issue is fixed in production and it checks your error monitoring and your metrics, reports what it sees, and says what it could not see.
Where your team works
Everything runs in the tools your team already uses.
Assigning work is a comment on the ticket. Status and questions come back in a channel where the whole team can see them. The review lands on the pull request in your code host with inline comments, and approval is the merge button.
An engineering manager can hand off a sprint’s worth of tickets from that channel and read every report there when the work comes back. Nothing gets installed on anyone’s laptop.
eng-backlog
Example
Messages
Files
Pins
Today
J
Jordan
9:02 AM
@rollbar-lines take PLA-1666. Pre-check live-feed support and fall back to a timed refresh.
Rollbar Lines
APP
9:02 AM
On it. Booting a virtual machine for the web app repository and reading the ticket.
Rollbar Lines
APP
9:41 AM
Tests passed. Pull request open on the feed client and fallback timer, 3 files changed. Not verified: behavior against production traffic. Report attached to the pull request.
2
J
Jordan
10:15 AM
Reviewed and merged. Nice.
Message #eng-backlog
Your team hands it the same requests they would hand a teammate.
“Address the feedback on this pull request and update it.”
It reads the review comments, makes the changes, rebases on the latest main branch, resolves conflicts, and pushes. If CI fails, tell it to fix that too.
“Test this pull request end to end and show me a screenshot.”
It pulls the branch into a full copy of your stack on its virtual machine, runs the flow, and attaches the screenshot to the pull request.
“Can you reproduce this issue? Is it still valid? Is it fixed in production?”
It tries the reproduction, checks production, and answers with evidence, so stale tickets get closed and real ones get scoped before anyone spends a day on them.
“Make a plan for this ticket and open the sub-issues.”
It writes the implementation plan and creates one ticket per standalone pull request in your tracker, so a large migration turns into work it can take one piece at a time.
“What does this error mean? How is production looking right now?”
It reads your error monitoring and your metrics, Rollbar and Grafana included, and answers in the channel with what it found and what it could not see.
“Review every pull request in this stack.”
It reviews several pull requests at once, each with inline comments and a statement of what it did not check, and it runs on every pull request posted to the channel without being asked.
Verified work
It is tested before the merge and checked after it.
Every pull request comes with a written account of what Rollbar Lines ran and what it left unverified, and every review names the files it followed and the checks it skipped. After the merge, ask it whether the fix held and it reads your error monitoring and metrics and answers with what it found. That report is what lets your reviewer tell a tested change from an untested one.
From a real review by the agent
rollbar-lines
bot
left a review
Finding (Medium): a customer access token is written into extra_data.key before the payload is sent. Traced through four files. Checked production config: scrub_fields is empty, so nothing would remove it before storage.
I did not run anything, no test results are claimed here.
The finding was correct, and the last line is the part a human reviewer almost never writes.
Where this goes
Next, we measure the effect of the work.
Rollbar has measured production software for 14 years. The next step for Rollbar Lines is to check the outcome of every piece of work it does. Each pull request will carry a check that it had the intended effect, using the signals you already collect, from Rollbar or from anything else. We have run that check by hand on our own fixes, and it caught one that had not worked.
Teams already on Rollbar Observability get that check sooner.
What it will check after every merge
Did the error rate drop after the fix deployed?
Did the feature get used by the people it was built for?
Did anything else break that the tests did not cover?
What did it cost, next to what it delivered?
Tell us about your stack.
We will tell you what the first line looks like.
Set up a demo, or talk with a Rollbar engineer about where it would fit.