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Datadog NextJS Integration For Comprehensive App Monitoring

Are you ready to enhance your Vercel logging experience with Datadog NextJS? Integrating Datadog with NextJS for comprehensive app monitoring can be innovative. Let's explore this more and see how it can benefit you.

Alerty’s NextJS logging as a valuable tool for achieving your objectives when integrating Datadog with NextJS for comprehensive app monitoring.

Table of Contents

What Is Datadog?

man giving a thumb up - Datadog NextJS

Datadog is a monitoring and analytics tool that provides IT and DevOps teams with insights into the performance metrics and event monitoring for infrastructure and cloud services. 

It allows users to monitor services such as:

  • Servers
  • Databases
  • Other tools

Features of Datadog for Vercel Logging

The Datadog monitoring software can be deployed on-premises and as a software-as-a-service (SaaS). 

Reaching Every Corner

It supports various operating systems like Windows, Linux, and Mac, along with cloud service providers like:

  • AWS
  • Microsoft Azure
  • Red Hat OpenShift
  • Google Cloud Platform

Powering Performance

The monitoring tool uses a Go-based agent with a backend comprising:

  • Apache Cassandra
  • PostgreSQL
  • Kafka

Integrations for Vercel Logging

To enhance its usability, Datadog offers a REST API that allows for seamless integration with:

  • Various services
  • Tools
  • Programming languages

Extending Functionality

It supports integrations with multiple platforms like:

  • Kubernetes
  • Chef
  • Puppet
  • Ansible
  • Ubuntu
  • Bitbucket

Benefits of Datadog for Vercel Logging

One of Datadog's key highlights is its user-friendly interface, which includes customizable dashboards. These dashboards can display real-time graphs made up of multiple data sources.

Alert Options

Users can receive notifications regarding performance issues on specific metrics like compute rates promptly through:

  • Emails
  • Slack
  • PagerDuty

Enhanced Logging

Through the robust features and integrations that Datadog provides, Vercel logging can be significantly improved for a seamless and efficient monitoring experience.

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Key Features And Benefits Of Using Datadog With NextJS

man looking at features of Datadog NextJS

Datadog offers comprehensive monitoring tools that allow you to track:

  • Key metrics
  • Logs
  • Traces across your Next.js application. 

Proactive Insights

By leveraging Datadog's monitoring capabilities, you can gain a view of your application's performance and identify potential issues proactively. Datadog provides real-time monitoring and alerting features that enable you to detect and respond to performance issues as they occur. 

Deep Visibility

By setting up custom alerts based on specific performance thresholds, you can ensure you're notified immediately when issues arise. 

The platform's distributed tracing capabilities allow you to trace requests across different services and components in your Next.js application, aiding in identifying bottlenecks and performance issues that span multiple layers. 

Seamless Integration

Datadog provides seamless integrations with various technologies and frameworks, including Next.js. Integrating Datadog with your Next.js application allows you to leverage its monitoring capabilities without significant overhead or configuration.

Monitor Everything with Alerty's Powerful Cloud Monitoring

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service for developers and early-stage startups, offering application performance monitoring, database monitoring, and incident management.

Enhance Development with Cross-Platform Support

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

Alerty Monitors Databases and Metrics

  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL
  • RDS
  • Tracks key metrics: CPU usage and memory consumption

Alerty Features for Efficient Monitoring

  • Quick incident management and Real User Monitoring (RUM)
  • Universal Service Monitoring includes Stripe API, OpenAI, and Vercel dependencies
  • AI-driven setup for cost-effective monitoring
  • Designed for ease of use and quick setup
  • Integrates with tools like Sentry for developers and small teams

Catch issues before they affect your users with Alerty's NextJS logging tool today!

Datadog NextJS Integration For Comprehensive App Monitoring

man in his office - Datadog NextJS

Real User Monitoring (RUM) enables you to visualize and analyze your application's users' real-time performance and user journeys. Integrating Datadog with your NextJS application for RUM browser monitoring can provide valuable insights into your application's performance.

Setup Steps

To set up Datadog RUM browser monitoring, follow these steps:

  • In Datadog, navigate the Real User Monitoring page and click the New Application button.
  • Enter a name for your application and click Generate Client Token. This generates a client token and an application ID for your application.
  • Set up the Datadog RUM SDK via npm or one hosted version: CDN async or CDN sync.
  • Deploy the changes to your application. Once your deployment is live, Datadog collects events from user browsers.
  • Visualize the data collected using Datadog dashboards.

SDK Installation

To install the Datadog library:

  • dd '@datadog/browser-rum' to your package.json using npm or your preferred package manager. 
  • Initialize it using 'datadog init'.

SSR Environment Variables

For Server-Side Rendering (SSR) in NextJS, all environment variables loaded through .env.local are only available in the Node.js environment by default. 

Datadog Library Exposure

To expose a variable to the browser, prefix it with NEXT_PUBLIC_. For example, instead of using “applicationId: process.env.DATADOG_APPLICATION_ID”, use “applicationId: process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_DATADOG_APPLICATION_ID”. 

Automatic Build-Time Inlining

This loads process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_DATADOG_APPLICATION_ID into the Node.js environment automatically, allowing you to use it anywhere in your code. 

RUM Insights

The value will be inlined into JavaScript sent to the browser because of the NEXT_PUBLIC_ prefix, which occurs at build time.

By integrating Datadog with NextJS for RUM browser monitoring, you can gain valuable insights into your application's performance and user experience, enabling you to optimize its performance and enhance user satisfaction.

What Can You Do With This Integration?

person enjoying benefits of Datadog NextJS

One key benefit of using Datadog's NextJS integration is the ability to monitor essential performance metrics to ensure the smooth functioning of your application. 

With the Datadog JavaScript library integrated into your Next.js app, you can track:

  • Page load times
  • Network requests
  • JavaScript errors

This monitoring feature visually represents these metrics on the Datadog dashboard, allowing you to identify any performance issues or anomalies quickly.

Creating Custom Dashboards

Datadog enables you to create custom dashboards tailored to your specific monitoring needs. These dashboards can include widgets for metrics like server:

By visualizing trends and setting up alerts on custom dashboards, you can make data-driven decisions to optimize your application's performance effectively.

Setting Alerts and Notifications

In addition to monitoring performance metrics, Datadog allows you to set up alerts and notifications based on predefined thresholds or custom conditions. 

This ensures you are immediately informed of critical issues affecting your Next.js app. Alerts can be configured to notify you via email, SMS, or integration with collaboration tools like Slack or PagerDuty.

Analyzing Logs and Traces

Datadog offers log management and distributed tracing capabilities that allow you to analyze application logs and trace requests across microservices in your Next.js app. 

Logs and traces provide valuable insights into the data flow within your application. This feature helps you pinpoint issues and optimize performance effectively, ensuring a seamless user experience.

Integrating with Third-Party Services

Datadog supports integrations with a wide range of third-party services and tools, enabling you to centralize monitoring and analytics within a single platform. Integrating Datadog allows you to streamline monitoring workflows and gain a holistic view of your Next.js app's performance with popular services like:

  • AWS
  • Google Cloud
  • GitHub 

This comprehensive approach ensures you have all the necessary tools to maintain your application's health and performance.

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Best Practices For Using Datadog With NextJS

man understanding use cases of Datadog NextJS

Logging

When logging in to your Next.js application, using a structured logging library such as Pino to generate JSON logs is crucial. This will help send logs to Datadog using the Datadog HTTP log intake API or a log shipper like the Datadog Agent. 

Including relevant metadata and context in your log entries can significantly aid in troubleshooting. Structured logs make it easier to navigate the vast amounts of data generated by applications and services, helping developers quickly and effectively identify and fix issues.

Error Tracking

Utilizing Datadog's error-tracking features can automatically capture and monitor errors in your Next.js app. It is essential to wrap your Next.js app with the DatadogErrorBoundary component to report client-side errors to Datadog. 

You can use Datadog's APM to trace errors back to their source in your Next.js code. Developers can quickly fix bugs by pinpointing where an error originates and help ensure a more seamless user experience.

Custom Metrics and Events

Custom metrics and events play a significant role in tracking the performance and user interactions of your Next.js application. 

Targeted Tracking

By integrating Datadog's RUM SDK, you can track these metrics and events specific to your Next.js application. Defining custom actions to track meaningful user interactions and conversions is essential. 

Data-Driven Optimization

You can then send these custom metrics to Datadog using the `datadogRum.addAction()` method. By tracking specific user actions, you can gather insights into what is working well and what might require improvement within your application.

Monitoring Dashboard

Building a custom Datadog dashboard to visualize and analyze data from your Next.js application is vital. This dashboard may include critical metrics like:

  • Page views
  • User actions
  • Errors
  • Performance data

By using dashboard templates, you can standardize monitoring across multiple Next.js apps. This can help you efficiently analyze your applications' performance and quickly identify potential issues to address.

5 Datadog Alternatives For Comprehensive NextJS App Monitoring

friends looking at Datadog NextJS

1. Alerty

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service for developers and early-stage startups, offering application performance monitoring, database monitoring, and incident management.

Enhance Development with Cross-Platform Support

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

Alerty Monitors Databases and Metrics

  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL
  • RDS
  • Tracks key metrics: CPU usage and memory consumption

Alerty Features for Efficient Monitoring

  • Quick incident management and Real User Monitoring (RUM)
  • Universal Service Monitoring includes Stripe API, OpenAI, and Vercel dependencies
  • AI-driven setup for cost-effective monitoring
  • Designed for ease of use and quick setup
  • Integrates with tools like Sentry for developers and small teams

Catch issues before they affect your users with Alerty's NextJS logging tool today!

2. Sentry

Sentry is a widely used APM tool known for its error monitoring and crash reporting capabilities. These capabilities come from collecting and centralizing error data from all your applications, allowing you to see where and what’s causing errors easily. 

Sentry also provides various tools to help you debug errors, including:

  • Stack traces
  • Logs
  • Environment variables

3. New Relic

New Relic started as an APM solution and followed Datadog's development path to evolve into an observability platform. It comes with out-of-the-box dashboards for many famous APM use cases and has built up an extensive library of integrations offered directly by New Relic.

4. Grafana

Grafana has become an open-source observability platform. Initially, it focused only on visualization of observability data, but it has since invested in building out an observability stack for:

  • Logging (Loki)
  • Tracing (Tempo)
  • Metrics (Mimir)

Metrics-Centric

Grafana is suitable for teams that focus heavily on metrics monitoring and don’t find logs or tracing as important or valuable (or are willing to pair other tools alongside). 

They may be interested in self-hosting the open-source version.

5.  Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic excels at positioning itself as a cloud-native Splunk alternative, focusing on log analysis and security workloads. 

Sumo Logic is suitable for enterprise teams that primarily want a flexible log analysis/SIEM platform and are willing to invest time in having engineers learn a bespoke query language.

Related Reading

Catch Issues Before They Affect Your Users with Alerty's NextJS Logging Tool

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service tailored for developers and early-stage startups seeking efficient and affordable monitoring solutions. By supporting popular technologies like NextJS, React, Vue, and Node.js, Alerty enables developers to identify and address application performance issues.

Monitors Databases

  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL
  • RDS

Tracks Vital Metrics

  • CPU usage
  • Memory consumption

With quick incident management and Real User Monitoring (RUM) features, Alerty helps optimize user experience by tracking user interactions in real-time. 

AI-Powered Monitoring Made Simple and Affordable

The platform's Universal Service Monitoring encompasses essential dependencies like the Stripe API, OpenAI, and Vercel. Alerty leverages artificial intelligence to simplify setup, offering a cost-effective alternative to other monitoring services.

Optimize Your Workflow with Quick Setup and Effortless Integrations

Its user-friendly design ensures quick and hassle-free setup, and its seamless integration with tools like Sentry makes it ideal for developers and small teams looking for efficient monitoring tools. 

Experience the benefits of Alerty's NextJS logging tool today to proactively identify and resolve issues before they impact your users.