12 Days of Partners, Integrations, and Other Good Stuff: Rollbar

It’s that time of year again. Snow has begun falling from the skies in places that are lucky enough to have moisture in the air, we’re all already tired of hearing Michael Buble songs playing on a loop, and some of us are getting in the spirit by wearing ugly Christmas sweaters everywhere we go.

To celebrate, Shortcut is highlighting twelve of our favorite integrations and partnerships. We hope you return every day to read these posts alongside your tinglers and fuzzles, your dafflers and wuzzles, and your delicious pot (or Beyond meat) roast.

Our eighth featured Integration is Rollbar, which helps you roll right over any bugs you encounter. On the Eighth Day of Integrations Shortcut gives to you: eight bugs a'messing up your app for your customers who are using it on Google Chrome, as well as a Rollbar to help fix them.

Bugs are an accepted and unavoidable part of the software development process. That's because very few individual software bugs are as destructive as flaws in other engineering processes. A mistake in planning the construction of a bridge can result in that bridge flopping around in the wind until it falls over, requiring that you build a new bridge from scratch while probably resolving tons of lawsuits. A mistake in shipping a piece of software can often be resolved by fixing a typo and without involving even a single attorney. Not nearly as bad.

But all the many small bugs that every engineer ships add up to a ton of wasted time and annoyance for those engineers and their customers. Ideally bugs would be easy to spot and get surfaced well before more than a few people notice them, alongside context that helps you quickly fix the issue.

Our integration with Rollbar (and other tools) helps bring this ideal scenario closer to reality.

How does it work?

Our Rollbar integration enables you to generate Shortcut Stories from Rollbar Issues and then to resolve / update those Stories (and vice-versa) based on the current progress on fixing the Issue.

This particular integration takes a couple of extra steps to set up, but those steps take very little time.

In Shortcut

Go to Settings → API Tokens, generate a new API token named "Rollbar" (or anything you want to name it), and copy it to your clipboard.

In Rollbar

Go to User Settings → Connected Account → Shortcut and save your Shortcut API token.

In your Rollbar project, go to Settings → Notifications and select Shortcut from the list of options.

In the Shortcut configuration screen enter the following:

• API Token: Just make sure the token you generated above is the one you select.
• Organization: Name of your organization.
• Shortcut workflow: The Workflow where you want new Stories to be created.
• Shortcut epic: The Epic you want new Stories to be part of. (Optional)
• Initial state: The Workflow state you want Rollbar generated Stories to start in.
• Reactivated state: The Workflow state Stories will start in if a resolved Rollbar Issue comes back after being fixed and needs to be dealt with again
• Resolved state: This one is pretty obvious
• Labels: Labels to apply to stories when created. (Optional)

Click Save Settings, then click Send Test Notification to verify that stories can be created with the correct configuration.

Configure your automated rules, as described in Rollbar's Issue Tracking guide.

Click the toggle to set the integration to Enabled.

All done! Now with Shortcut and Rollbar you'll be fixing so many bugs that your tech debt will become a tech surplus.