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What Is Browser Monitoring? 13 Best Real Browser Monitoring Tools

Imagine this: you’re on a mission to boost your website’s performance. But no matter how hard you try, you keep hitting a wall. For instance, you notice that your site’s speed is much slower than that of your competitors. Then, you ask for help on an online forum. You turn to your website's performance monitoring tool for help. The data it provides is so confusing that you can't tell if the problem concerns your site's backend or front end. Many website owners face challenges like these when trying to improve performance. This blog will discuss browser monitoring the most effective solution for getting your website back on track. This will help you understand the data to pinpoint and fix issues impacting your site’s performance especially those affecting visitors.  Browser monitoring tools analyze and track data related to a website’s front end. 

This blog will help you understand how they work and why their performance is crucial for providing a good user experience. Learn how to utilize browser monitoring tools to enhance your website’s performance. One of the best solutions for monitoring your website’s performance is Alerty's frontend monitoring. These front end monitoring tools will help you achieve your goals by tracking and analyzing your visitors’ experience. With this solution, you can understand how your website performs for users in the real world and get the insights you need to solve problems fast.

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Table of Contents

What Is Browser Monitoring?

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Browser monitoring is like having a constant pulse on how your website is performing from the perspective of your users. It’s a tool that helps you understand how your site behaves in real-world conditions, ensuring everything runs smoothly for anyone visiting your page. 

Whether it's tracking how quickly your site loads or spotting any hiccups users might encounter, browser monitoring keeps you informed.

Why Does Browser Monitoring Matter?

User experience is everything. AWS cites that 88% of us won’t return to a website after a bad user experience. Visitors will likely get frustrated and leave if your website is slow or buggy, hurting your business or brand. 

Browser monitoring allows you to catch issues before they become big problems, ensuring your site is always performing at its best. It’s like having a backstage crew working around the clock to ensure the show goes off without a hitch, keeping your audience happy and engaged.

What Does Browser Monitoring Measure?

Browser monitoring tracks the performance of front-end applications and ensures that the user experience is not affected. If page loads are longer or cross the set threshold values, it will notify you immediately through one of the specified notification channels.

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Features Of Browser Monitoring

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Real User Monitoring: The Key to Understanding Actual Users’ Experiences

Real User Monitoring (RUM) gives you insights into how actual users experience your web applications. It monitors the performance of your front-end applications as users interact with them, providing a complete, real-time picture. 

With RUM, you can see exactly how users are affected by delays or issues, visualized in a waterfall format. This allows you to pinpoint where performance problems occur, like:

  • Slow loading times
  • Elements not rendering correctly

Ajax Monitoring: Keeping Tabs on Your App’s Data Fetching Performance

Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) calls to fetch data from a server without refreshing the entire web page. Ajax Monitoring focuses on these calls and identifies any slowing down your application. 

By giving you clear visibility into the performance of Ajax calls, this feature alerts you when they cause delays. This way, you can optimize these calls to ensure your application remains:

  • Responsive
  • Fast for users

Session Traces: A Detailed Report of User Activity on Your Site

Session traces provide a detailed report of your website's user session. This includes everything from page load times, callbacks, and database requests to Ajax requests and other events during the session. By analyzing the timeline of a session, you can identify the exact point where a problem arises on a web page. 

This feature displays crucial details like the page URL, browser, user location, and specific actions that took longer than expected, making troubleshooting and fixing issues immediately easier.

JavaScript Error Tracking: Monitoring Crashes and Their Causes

This feature tracks and reports JavaScript errors that occur on your web pages. When a crash occurs, it provides detailed information on the:

  • Browser
  • Operating system
  • Stack traces
  • Other relevant data

JavaScript is a core component of modern web applications, so when errors occur, they can significantly impact user experience.

JavaScript Error Tracking helps you quickly identify the exact points where these errors occur, allowing you to fix them promptly and prevent crashes or glitches from affecting your users.

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Importance Of Browser Monitoring

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When you regularly monitor your site, you can quickly spot and fix issues, ensuring visitors have a seamless experience. Happy users are likelier to:

  • Stay on your site longer
  • Engage with your content
  • Even return

Improves Website Security

Beyond performance, browser monitoring is also crucial for keeping your site secure. It helps you identify potential security threats, such as phishing attacks or vulnerabilities in your APIs, before they become significant problems. 

By catching these issues early, you protect your users' data and maintain their trust, which is invaluable in today's online world.

Improves Reliability

Another significant advantage is that browser monitoring helps improve your site's reliability. When errors and performance bottlenecks are detected early, you can address them quickly, ensuring your site runs smoothly.

This keeps your users happy and boosts rankings since fast search engines like Google favor reliable websites.

Helps You Resolve Issues Fast

Another critical benefit of browser monitoring is facilitating faster issue resolution. With real-time alerts, you can respond to problems as soon as they arise, minimizing downtime and maintaining a positive user experience. 

This quick response is key to the following:

  • Keeping your visitors satisfied 
  • Your business running smoothly

Improves Your Business Decisions

The insights gained from browser monitoring are valuable for making informed business decisions. By analyzing how users interact with your site and which areas need improvement, you can tailor your offerings and strategies to meet their needs better.

Protects Your Reputation

Another reason browser monitoring is so important is maintaining your site's reputation. A website that frequently encounters issues can tarnish your brand's image. 

Regular monitoring ensures that your site operates smoothly, helping you maintain a positive public perception and a healthy reputation.

What Is The Difference Between Synthetic Monitoring And Browser Monitoring?

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Synthetic Monitoring: A Controlled Experiment for Your Website

Synthetic monitoring acts like a controlled experiment for your site, using simulated user interactions to gauge performance. To do this, you deploy scripts that mimic user actions, like:

  • Clicking buttons
  • Filling out forms

These scripts report how your site performs under various conditions, giving you insights into how well your site might perform for real users.

Controlled Environment

One key advantage of synthetic monitoring is its ability to create a controlled environment. You can test your site from different locations, devices, and networks, allowing you to identify performance bottlenecks that could affect users in specific regions or on certain devices. 

It’s beneficial for regression testing—ensuring new updates don’t break anything—and monitoring your production sites to catch potential issues before they impact users.

Browser Monitoring: Real Users, Real Data 

Browser monitoring, on the other hand, is all about observing what’s happening with your users in real-time. This type of monitoring captures performance data as real users interact with your website or application. It works by injecting a script on each page that measures and reports back on the performance metrics that your users are experiencing.

Real-World Data

This real-world data is precious because it shows you exactly how your application is performing in the wild, with all the variability that comes with different:

  • Users
  • Locations
  • Devices

Browser monitoring helps you understand long-term trends, pinpoint areas that need optimization, and gather data that can inform your business decisions.

The Main Difference: Proactive vs. Reactive Monitoring

The main difference between the two is their approach to gathering performance data. Synthetic monitoring uses artificial simulations to predict how your site might perform. In contrast, browser monitoring uses data from actual users to show you how your site is performing in real-time. 

Synthetic monitoring offers a controlled testing environment, which is excellent for preemptive checks and ensuring stability. Browser monitoring provides a more accurate picture of user experience, highlighting real-world issues as they happen.

Complementary Methods

Both methods are essential in their own right but serve different purposes. Synthetic monitoring is proactive, helping you catch potential problems before they affect users. In contrast, browser monitoring is reactive, giving you the insight to address issues arising in fundamental user interactions. 

Together, they provide a comprehensive view of your website’s performance, ensuring you can maintain a smooth and responsive user experience.

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13 Best Real Browser Monitoring Tools

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1. Alerty: Efficient Monitoring for Developers and Startups

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service for developers and early-stage startups, offering:

  • Application performance monitoring
  • Database monitoring
  • Incident management

It supports technologies like:

  • NextJS
  • React
  • Vue
  • Node.js, helping developers identify and fix issues

Database Monitoring

Alerty monitors databases such as:

  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL
  • RDS, tracking key metrics like CPU usage and memory consumption. 

It features quick incident management and Real User Monitoring (RUM) to optimize user experience. Its Universal Service Monitoring covers dependencies like:

  • Stripe API
  • OpenAI
  • Vercel

AI-Powered Monitoring

Alerty uses AI to simplify setup, providing a cost-effective solution compared to competitors. It is designed for ease of use, allowing quick setup, and integrates with tools like Sentry, making it ideal for developers and small teams needing efficient, affordable monitoring. 

Catch issues before they affect your users with Alerty's free APM solution today!

2. Dynatrace: A Robust Observability Solution

Dynatrace is a robust observability solution that covers various aspects, such as synthetic monitoring and accurate browser monitoring. It's primarily designed for enterprise-level use and is well-known as one of the best API tracking tools on the market. With Dynatrace, users can proactively detect and resolve problems before they affect end-users. 

By conducting thorough tests to assess application availability and performance through real browsers, users can:

  • Quickly identify the underlying causes of issues within their applications 
  • Make necessary fixes or optimizations

Global Footprint

Dynatrace is also known for its extensive network of test locations worldwide. It offers many more testing locations than the average tool, and this global presence enables continuous performance monitoring of APIs, ensuring their proper functionality and taking proactive measures to address potential problems.

3. New Relic: A Comprehensive Observability Tool

New Relic is a behemoth in the wide world of observability. Essentially, there’s no tool or feature that New Relic doesn’t offer. The same can be said for a few others on this list, but they weren’t recently bought out for $6.5 billion. New Relic provides a powerful synthetic monitoring solution, which includes real browser monitoring. It’s excellent for:

  • Troubleshooting quickly
  • Enhancing build quality
  • Collaborating effectively

Transparent Pricing

You can mimic the entire user experience and publicly and privately test how your applications perform from different locations worldwide. In addition to web browsers, you can simulate various devices and operating systems to identify any underperforming elements needing improvement. New Relic boasts a transparent pricing structure, but it’s quite the opposite. 

They don’t offer tangible upfront prices but require users to calculate their expenses. With New Relic's free plan, you can have one user and use up to 100GB of data without extra charges. If you go over these limits, they switch to a pay-as-you-go system. For every extra gigabyte of data beyond the initial 100GB, you'll be charged 25 cents.

Tiered Pricing

If you exceed 1,000 incident events monthly, each additional event will cost you 50 cents. Their pricing also depends on the level of access and features each user needs. Basic users are included at no cost in any plan but have some limitations. If you need more features, Core users are priced at $49 per seat per month, while full access to all the platform features starts at $99 per seat per month and can go up to $658 per seat per month. 

This tiered pricing gives you flexibility but can lead to different costs, which only suit some organizations' budgets or requirements. It might seem more complex than it initially seems.

4. AppDynamics: All-in-One Monitoring

AppDynamics takes your web application monitoring to the next level with real browser monitoring. It helps you proactively assess your app's performance and availability from various locations worldwide. AppDynamics is an all-in-one solution that includes:

  • Synthetic monitoring
  • Real User Monitoring (RUM)
  • Infrastructure monitoring
  • Security monitoring

While you can use it as a single solution, you'll get the most value (though it can be pricey) when you combine multiple solutions to improve data correlation. Like other synthetic monitoring tools, AppDynamics allows you to identify and address issues before they impact your users.

Pricing Model

Its unique ability to retest any failures helps reduce the number of false alarms or alerts. AppDynamics' pricing may seem simple initially, but it can get tricky if you're unfamiliar with your system's details. The pricing mainly depends on how many CPU cores you use, except for Real User Monitoring (RUM), which has a different pricing structure.

5. Splunk: A Strong Player in Synthetic Monitoring

Recently acquired for a whopping $28 billion, Splunk is a strong player in synthetic monitoring. It stands out by providing comprehensive observability across your entire system and even throws in some security features that many other tools lack. Splunk is an all-in-one solution that promises to:

  • Protect against threats
  • Minimize downtime
  • Speed up issue resolution

It's a robust tool that offers a well-rounded set of solutions and features to help your organization perform at its best. Its extensive network sets Splunk apart (and possibly contributes to its higher cost). They have established partnerships with over 2,200 organizations spanning various industries, ensuring users can leverage the platform to its fullest potential. 

​​Active Community

They boast a community of over 18,000 active members and 1,800 Splunk experts who can assist you in:

  • Troubleshooting
  • Planning deployments
  • Scaling operations

Splunk needs to be more transparent about its pricing. Its website only provides prices for a select few solutions, and these details can be challenging to find.

6. Sematext Synthetics: A Comprehensive Solution for Synthetic Monitoring

Sematext Synthetics provides a comprehensive solution for synthetic monitoring. Their offering is designed to meet the demands of modern monitoring requirements, whether you're dealing with:

  • Hybrid environments
  • Cloud-based systems
  • On-premise servers

With Synthetics, you can monitor a wide range of metrics. It offers Uptime and API monitoring capabilities from various locations, including private networks and behind firewalls. It covers all monitoring layers, including DNS, TCP, SSL, and HTTP, and allows for customizable API monitoring. 

Synthetics keeps a vigilant eye on SSL certificates and website performance and offers end-to-end visibility. One of the standout features of Synthetics is its single-pane approach, which allows users to correlate data seamlessly across various sources, such as:

  • Infrastructure metrics
  • Application logs
  • Events
  • Real-user data
  • Synthetic performance metrics

Flexible Pricing

This integrated approach helps streamline monitoring and provides a holistic view of your system's health. Sematext offers flexible pricing options to cater to different customer needs. They have adopted both a pay-as-you-go model, where you can customize your subscription according to your requirements, and standard subscription packages. 

The pay-as-you-go Synthetics option is a flat $2 per HTTP monitor and $7 per browser monitor. Keep in mind, though, that there’s a $5 minimum. Alternatively, they offer a starter package for Synthetics with a monthly standard subscription starting at $29. This package includes monitoring for up to 40 HTTP endpoints and 5 Browser monitors, with a data retention period of 30 days.

7. Checkly: Customizable Monitoring for Web Applications

Checkly is an excellent choice for real browser monitoring. It provides comprehensive tools to monitor the health of your web applications. One standout feature of Checkly is the freedom it gives you to code your monitoring checks personally. 

You can integrate your monitoring tasks directly into your application's code repository, create your monitoring resources from scratch rather than just configuring them, and test the resources you have made locally on your machine and during the deployment process in your Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline.

Free and Paid

This entire monitoring process is powered by Checkly's global infrastructure, which is known for its reliability. Checkly provides a free plan, but it comes with limitations. It allows for only 10,000 API checks and supports just one user. If you're looking for a little more, they offer the Team plan starting at $40 per month. 

With this plan, you get 50,000 API checks and can have up to 20 users. For those with specific or larger requirements, Checkly also offers a custom plan that can be tailored to your needs. To learn more about this option, contact their sales team.

8. Datadog: A Powerful Observability Tool

Datadog is a powerful observability tool with an extensive range of features. It's known for its comprehensive synthetic monitoring capabilities but comes at a high cost, making it more suitable for larger businesses. One of Datadog's standout features regarding accurate browser monitoring is that it will run tests in:

  • Chrome
  • Firefox
  • Edge

Code-Free Testing

Most others on this list will only use Chrome. What's particularly lovely about Datadog is that it allows you to create tests without writing code. They offer a web recorder that lets you interact with your website as a regular user, providing real-time results. 

When issues arise, Datadog offers detailed information, including:

  • Screenshots
  • Performance data
  • Server traces
  • Error logs to help you pinpoint and address problems effectively

Network Comparison

Datadog also lets you compare your website's performance inside and outside your network firewall and provides automation tools to save time. With these monitoring options, you can efficiently manage issues and gain a comprehensive view of your website and systems. 

With all their solutions, listing all the details here would be impossible. Instead, we’ll list some notable solutions, including synthetics and real browser monitoring.

9. ManageEngine Applications Manager: Simplified Synthetic Monitoring

ManageEngine Applications Manager (MAM) is known for simplifying synthetic monitoring and genuine browser monitoring. It offers in-depth insights into the user experience and the performance of your critical applications and infrastructure components through:

  • Chrome
  • Firefox
  • Edge

MAM allows you to quickly identify and resolve performance-related issues across your entire stack, from the URL to the actual lines of code. With its robust APM capabilities, you can monitor database operations, identify slow SQL statements, and use distributed tracing features to streamline debugging, especially in microservices environments.

Code Profiling

MAM assists in pinpointing bottlenecks within your code stack through code profiling. It provides automated service maps, helping you visualize dependencies within your application architecture. ManageEngine Applications Manager is a dedicated tool designed explicitly for transaction monitoring. 

ManageEngine doesn’t list prices online. If you want details on its product pricing, you'll have to contact them.

10. SolarWinds Pingdom: Streamlined Synthetic Monitoring

SolarWinds' Pingdom offers a streamlined synthetic monitoring tool. Unlike some other tools, Pingdom focuses on providing two solutions:

  • Synthetics 
  • RUM (Real User Monitoring)

Pingdom promises to deliver a seamless digital experience by monitoring your web application. It proactively monitors the end-user experience with accurate browser testing and simulates key site transactions via browser tests in Chrome. It's essential to consider the downsides. While Pingdom is straightforward, it's not known for being budget-friendly. 

Due to its limited feature set, it doesn't support Playwright scripts for front-end testing. Pingdom's pricing structure is straightforward. It’s based on the number of monitors for synthetic monitoring and the volume of pageviews for RUM. For Synthetic monitoring, the starting price is just $10 per month, but it includes only 10 uptime monitors and 1 advanced monitor.

Scaling Up

You are also limited to 50 SMS alerts. However, the plans can scale significantly, reaching 30,000 uptime monitors and 2,500 advanced monitors with 1,500 SMS alerts. At this level, you're considering a substantial monthly cost of $18,300, assuming you choose annual payments. If you’re interested in RUM, the monthly pricing starts at $15, covering 100,000 pageviews.

The cost increases as your pageview volume grows, with the highest tier reaching $19,500 monthly for 1 billion pageviews. Again, these prices are based on annual payment options.

11. Zabbix: An Open-Source Monitoring Tool

Zabbix is a widely used open-source monitoring tool that offers many handy features. It allows you to keep an eye on various aspects of your system, including:

  • Transactions
  • Application performance
  • Real browser monitoring

Zabbix has ready-made templates for keeping tabs on different servers and operating systems. With Zabbix, you can collect data from other sources like:

  • Network devices
  • Cloud services
  • Containers
  • Databases
  • Applications
  • Real browser monitoring

Communication Channels

And when something goes awry, Zabbix can ping you through various communication channels like:

  • On-Call
  • Opsgenie
  • Pagerduty
  • Slack

What's neat is that Zabbix also provides learning materials and certifications to help you become a pro at using it. Despite being lightweight, Zabbix can monitor almost every part of your system.

12. Prometheus: A Metric-Driven Monitoring Tool

Prometheus is a metric-driven monitoring tool tailored to monitor your organization's performance, health, and even user behavior, including:

  • Web transactions
  • Real browser monitoring

Its ability to send alerts based on the real-time data it collects and stores sets it apart. Prometheus boasts a handy query language known as PromQL. This language empowers users to swiftly aggregate selected time series data in real-time and present the results in user-friendly graphs or tabular format. 

API Integration

One of Prometheus' standout features is its compatibility with external systems through the HTTP API. This means Prometheus seamlessly integrates with tools like Better Stack, offering support right out of the box. It plays nicely with Grafana, allowing you to craft informative dashboards displaying metrics gathered by Prometheus, including accurate browser monitoring data.

13. Cacti: Free and Open Source Monitoring Tool

Cacti is a free and open-source monitoring tool based on RRDTool. It’s user-friendly, offering features like:

  • A fast data collector
  • Advanced graph templates
  • Various data-gathering methods

Intuitive Interface

It displays comprehensive graphs that can be easily customized according to your needs. Additionally, Cacti employs network polling and data collection features to gather insights from various devices. 

Its intuitive interface makes it an excellent fit for LAN-sized installations in complex networks with multiple devices.

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Key Features Of Browser Monitoring Tools

Real User Monitoring (RUM): Get the Inside Scoop on Customer Experience 

Real User Monitoring, or RUM, provides direct insight into your customers' experiences as they interact with your site in the real world. This feature collects data from user sessions rather than relying on a sample or lab environment. 

RUM tracks performance metrics like page load times, time to first byte, and Core Web Vitals to give you a better understanding of how your site performs under real-world conditions. By analyzing RUM data, you can identify potential pain points that could hurt user experience and SEO and address them before they impact your bottom line.

Synthetic Monitoring: Proactively Check Your Site’s Performance

Synthetic monitoring lets you catch performance issues before they affect real users. This feature uses bots to simulate user interactions with your site, testing its performance and availability by mimicking user behavior from different locations and devices. 

By proactively checking your site’s performance with synthetic monitoring, you can identify and address issues before they affect actual visitors.

Error Tracking: Keep Tabs on What Goes Wrong 

Error tracking helps you monitor and fix problems on your site. Browser monitoring tools track errors during user sessions, such as JavaScript failures or broken links. 

They provide detailed logs and alerts so your development team can quickly identify and resolve issues before they escalate. This feature is crucial for maintaining a bug-free user experience and minimizing disruptions.

Performance Metrics: Measure What Matters

Measuring performance is key to optimizing your website; browser monitoring tools excel at this. They track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as:

  • Page speed
  • Core web vitals
  • Server response times

By monitoring these metrics, you can make data-driven decisions to improve your site’s speed and responsiveness, which in turn:

  • Boosts SEO rankings
  • Enhances user satisfaction

Alerting and Notifications: Get Real-Time Feedback on Performance Issues

Browser monitoring tools often include alerting and notification features to inform your team of any issues. In real-time, these systems can notify your team whenever performance drops below a certain threshold or when errors occur. 

This immediate feedback ensures that problems are addressed quickly, reducing the potential for extended downtime or poor user experiences.

Dashboards and Reporting: Visualize Performance Data for Better Insights

A good monitoring tool will also provide comprehensive dashboards and reporting features. These dashboards give you a centralized view of all the critical metrics, allowing you to monitor your website’s health at a glance. 

You can generate reports to:

  • Analyze trends
  • Track performance over time
  • Make informed decisions about future optimizations 

Related Reading

Catch Issues Before They Affect Your Users with Alerty's Free APM Solution

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service for developers and early-stage startups, offering:

  • Application performance monitoring
  • Database monitoring
  • Incident management

It supports technologies like:

  • NextJS
  • React
  • Vue
  • Node.js, helping developers identify and fix issues

Database Monitoring

Alerty monitors databases such as:

  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL
  • RDS, tracking key metrics like CPU usage and memory consumption. 

It features quick incident management and Real User Monitoring (RUM) to optimize user experience. Its Universal Service Monitoring covers dependencies like:

  • Stripe API
  • OpenAI
  • Vercel

AI-Powered Monitoring

Alerty uses AI to simplify setup, providing a cost-effective solution compared to competitors. It is designed for ease of use, allowing quick setup, and integrates with tools like Sentry, making it ideal for developers and small teams needing efficient, affordable monitoring. 

Catch issues before they affect your users with Alerty's free APM solution today!

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