Frontend monitoring tools are vital for ensuring the performance and stability of your applications. Imagine spending hours creating a beautiful website only to realize it's slow and error-prone when launched. Frustrating, but that’s where Vercel logging comes in to save the day. This blog will explore frontend monitoring tools and best practices that can help you avoid such scenarios, allowing you to confidently create top-notch applications.
Looking to enhance your frontend performance and error tracking? Consider Alerty's NextJS logging solution. It's a fantastic tool that can help you achieve your goals by providing insights into front-end monitoring tools and best practices.
Frontend application monitoring is the process and tools developers use to track and maintain the health of your applications' presentation layer. It’s basically everything that a user interacts with, from the content and menu to APIs and other client-facing components. The main goal of front-end application monitoring is to:
Errors can be caught early on, making them simple for your developers to fix. They can then work on debugging and improving the code after that. While backend application performance monitoring relies on observability through traces, metrics, and logs, frontend application performance monitoring involves three main data types:
Identifying and diagnosing bugs or issues that prevent users from using an application as intended
Measuring an application’s speed and responsiveness to ensure optimal user experiences
Recording user interactions in real time to gain insights into potential bottlenecks or problematic areas within the app
Collecting and leveraging this data efficiently helps developers create more seamless user experiences.
Monitoring tools are essential software applications that help businesses closely monitor their computer systems and networks' performance, health, and security. These tools track various metrics to ensure everything is running smoothly:
The primary purpose of monitoring tools is to detect potential issues early, allowing administrators to address them before they escalate into significant problems that could impact users. For instance, if a server's CPU load is consistently high, a monitoring tool can alert the IT team, who can investigate and resolve the issue before it affects application performance.
In addition to detecting problems, monitoring tools often provide real-time data and historical reports, helping businesses optimize their systems and plan for future needs. These tools are crucial in maintaining IT environments' reliability, efficiency, and security by continuously tracking key metrics.
Front-end application monitoring is a critical aspect of ensuring the smooth functioning of your website or web application. By closely monitoring the front-end layer, you can proactively identify potential issues and quickly address them before they impact your users. This is especially important in today's fast-paced digital world, where any downtime or performance degradation could have severe consequences.
Front-end monitoring is also essential for maintaining good SEO. Search engines like Google consider various metrics, such as page speed and rendering errors, when ranking websites. A slow-performing website could lead to lower rankings and reduced visibility, ultimately affecting your organic traffic and potential customers.
The performance of your website is crucial for user experience, especially on mobile devices with limited resources. By monitoring and optimizing your front-end performance, you can ensure a seamless experience for all users, regardless of their device or location.
To help with front-end monitoring and logging, services like Alerty offer comprehensive solutions tailored to developers and early-stage startups. Their NextJS logging tool, for instance, allows you to track and analyze your NextJS applications' performance in real-time, enabling you to catch issues before they impact your users.
By leveraging tools like Alerty, you can stay ahead of potential problems and deliver a flawless experience to your users consistently.
Website monitoring checks a website’s performance and functionality. A website combines frontend and backend services, so monitoring a website will also provide insights into both frontend and backend monitoring. Website monitoring helps ensure that your website works as intended. For instance, you’ll want to ensure your website doesn’t cause any 5xx server errors.
A well-formatted and functioning site map is also important as it allows search engine crawlers to index your website easily. You can monitor other aspects like:
If any of these aspects fail the monitoring tests, the monitoring system notifies the support team, who can then take the required actions and fix the issues. A good website monitoring tool should have the following features. Some CDN nodes may sometimes go down if your website uses CDN. So, monitoring your website in different regions is important, and you need to choose a tool that detects multiregional downtime.
Performance depends upon different metrics, like bundle size and bandwidth, so your monitoring tool should be able to provide detailed performance measurements. Most modern browsers block websites that don’t use HTTPS, so your monitoring tool should also verify SSL certificates.
Pinging a website too often wastes resources, and if I ping after a long delay, I may miss out on an important event. Hence, a good tool should allow me to configure the request intervals according to my needs.
API monitoring is used to monitor API uptime and correctness. It can be implemented to monitor both REST APIs and GraphQL APIs. While APIs work on the backend, they are integrated with the frontend. So, if a frontend is rendered based on the API’s response, then the API’s response time is a very important metric to monitor as it affects the frontend's load time.
Some of the best practices for implementing API monitoring include the following:
Real user monitoring (RUM) allows you to detect user-specific performance issues, JavaScript errors, and other device-specific issues by recording user sessions. Users’ browsers, geographic locations, and connection speeds vary significantly. These factors define your users’ experience and affect your website’s performance; this is exactly where real user monitoring comes into play.
One of the best practices to consider while implementing real user monitoring is tracking the performance of newly added features. New features are bound to break more often than existing ones. You should also track real user journeys through the application, as this helps you understand how end-users experience your website.
Logging the errors on the frontend is as important as logging those on the backend. Frontend errors are usually JavaScript errors that can turn your UI into a mess. For example, in a React.js app, you may pass a string value to a prop that accepts a number value, which can cause problems in mathematical calculations and result in errors.
You can wrap your code in a try-catch block and add a console.log statement in the catch or finally block to catch such errors. However, the console statement only logs the information in the user’s browser, which you don’t have access to, and this is where frontend error-logging tools can help you.
Frontend error-logging tools provide logs and other important information like:
A good frontend error-logging tool should at least have the following functions:
Frontend monitoring tools are essential for identifying and fixing application performance issues, particularly in terms of speed. Slow-loading resources can create bottlenecks, leading to a poor user experience.
To address this, developers must optimize resources and minimize response times to ensure that their websites or applications load quickly. A key metric for determining the target response time is the Application Performance Index (Apdex), which aids in setting performance benchmarks for websites.
Frontend monitoring tools play a crucial role in detecting errors and ensuring the functionality of websites and applications. These tools can alert developers to issues such as:
By enabling log monitoring and management, these tools facilitate the quick identification and resolution of issues, thus improving the overall user experience.
Ensuring the availability of a website or application is a fundamental concern for developers, particularly as user bases grow and become more distributed globally. Real user monitoring tools can provide insights into user experiences, allowing developers to optimize performance by evaluating user interactions and responses.
By leveraging these tools, developers can make informed decisions concerning performance improvements, scaling, or operational optimizations to enhance availability and user experience.
Start by identifying the specific elements of your frontend that require monitoring and evaluation. This foundational step ensures that you focus on critical aspects directly impacting user experience and align your monitoring efforts with your application’s essential functionalities. Doing so prevents overwhelming data collection and can direct your attention to the most valuable metrics, enabling a targeted and actionable monitoring approach.
Key metrics to monitor:
Select a frontend monitoring tool that aligns with the programming language and framework used to build your application. Compatibility with your app’s language ensures accurate data collection and meaningful insights. This compatibility streamlines the monitoring process and enhances the tool’s effectiveness in identifying issues specific to your technology stack.
During high user activity periods, closely observe your application’s performance and resource usage. Alerty can monitor your applications for free. Monitoring system usage during peak times provides valuable insights into how your front end handles heavy traffic.
It helps identify potential performance bottlenecks, ensuring your application remains responsive and functional despite intense user demand. This step prevents performance degradation during critical moments and ensures a consistently positive user experience, especially during peak usage.
Bridge the gap between data collected from frontend monitoring and the key business metrics driving your organization. Linking analytics data with business metrics provides a holistic understanding of how frontend performance influences your bottom line. It enables you to quantify the impact of performance on:
By aligning technical insights with business objectives, you gain actionable insights that drive informed decisions and prioritize optimizations that directly impact your organization’s goals. Metrics that matter include:
Regular and continuous monitoring ensures that your application’s performance remains optimal. You can detect issues early by:
This step ensures that your front end consistently delivers a user experience that aligns with user expectations and business objectives.
Alerty is a cloud monitoring service for developers and early-stage startups, offering:
It supports technologies like NextJS, React, Vue, and Node.js, helping developers identify and fix issues.
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 NextJS logging tool today!
AppSignal is a tool that provides insights into your performance for both the front end and the background jobs. It has host monitoring and error tracking and allows you to collect metrics from your app. With easily customizable dashboards, you can keep an eye on:
AppSignal is simple to install thanks to the lightweight Rust-powered agent. It monitors your applications’ performance displaying a simple breakdown of the actions it recorded and the metrics associated with it. You’ll see details about:
This lets you understand what part of your application is taxing your performance and what areas need improvement.
It features an anomaly detection system with a few prebuilt alerts that trigger whenever things aren’t working as they should. This is useful when you are just starting out and are unsure what to look for or when you are under a heavy load and have too many things to keep track of.
While AppSignal is easy to use and implement, it needs advanced logging and infrastructure monitoring, leaving you with a few big questions. You’ll be able to see all your frontend performance details, but half of the picture will be blank.
Sentry provides engineering teams with tools to detect and solve user-impacting bugs and other issues. One of the cool things about it is its open-source version, which is completely free and has the same bells and whistles as the paid version.
Sentry will tell you when your application is crashing or running too slowly and how it is performing, enabling you to drill down into the areas that require your attention. Instead of addressing the error, you would address the issue that eventually led to it.
The performance view lets you understand how many transactions are getting triggered and how long they take. It also shows you an Apdex score, which, is the ratio of both tolerable and satisfactory response times compared to all the response times.
While Sentry supports server-side programming languages, it lacks a server-specific logs integration. It does allow you to drill down on different transactions and see a breakdown of all the resources associated with them. This is not a deal-breaker for most, but if you are looking for an end-to-end monitoring solution, this one might leave you wanting more.
Rollbar started in San Francisco in 2012 as a tool to capture errors from Ruby applications. Since then, it has expanded into many other platforms, including front-end error monitoring. VC funds it and has raised $18.5 million.
Rollbar and TrackJS are the only products in this listing that focus on error monitoring. The allows the Rollbar UI to be clean and simple to use. Rollbar has some powerful machine-learning tools that came in via their acquisition of SameBug that allow errors to be automatically grouped together. Rollbar lacks capability around Ignore Rules and filtering, meaning you’ll have to deal with extra noise from errors that don’t really matter to your users.
Raygun is a New Zealand-based application monitoring platform that has existed since 2007. It was developed as a product from Mindscape, a .NET developer tooling company, but has expanded into other platforms, including the frontend web monitoring space. Raygun provides:
Raygun offers developers various services, especially in the .NET stack, where you can leverage licensing across other tools in their portfolio. One of Raygun's most powerful features for front-end error monitoring is its error grouping capability, which allows you to normalize errors between languages and browsers easily.
BugSnag started in San Francisco in 2012 as a fullstack error monitoring platform, which was very unique at the time. Their product has expanded into the full Application Performance Monitoring space, going after more enterprise customers. BugSnag was funded by venture capital and acquired by Private Equity holding SmartBear in 2021.
Since then, their prices have increased substantially. BugSnag supports lots of different platforms, allowing you to align your frontend and backend processes, or grouping your mobile and web data together.
Site24x7 is an alternative for viewing how your application or project does in the real world. Advertised as an availability and user experience monitoring solution, Site24x7 offers many neat features like:
When it comes to frontend performance monitoring, Site24x7 has a Web section where you can create monitors for your websites or APIs. These monitors will ping your desired resource to collect data like availability, response time, downtimes, etc.
Site24x7 will also track SLA compliance on their REST API section, which will come in handy. This view shows a breakdown of your availability and response by location, a history of all your breakdowns that occurred in the past 24 hours, as well as details on throughput and response times. Besides that, Site24x7 monitors your SSL and TLS certificates as well as domain expiration and will let you know whenever one expires, or there’s an issue.
As part of their product lineup, Site24x7 offers cloud-based log management that allows you to have a centralized location for log monitoring. This will make troubleshooting infrastructure issues a lot easier by providing actionable insights on things like exceptions, timeouts, delays, and other errors you might encounter.
Pingdom (owned by SolarWinds) is an uptime monitoring service with a wide range of features, including:
With a flexible alerting system, Pingdom will notify you when there’s any service interruption or degradation.
The uptime monitoring view will give you insight into how long it takes for a page or resource to load fully. If an error occurs, you’ll be able to use their incident reports manager to dig deep into the transaction to reach the root cause of the issue. The traceroute is very useful in this scenario.
Speaking of issues, Pingdom will alert you whenever something goes wrong. These alerts are customizable, allowing you to select who gets notified and how many alerts you receive. This will make assigning the right person to the job a lot quicker. You can also schedule regular reports on your site’s health.
When it comes to performance reporting, the Page speed section is your go-to whenever you need detailed information on your website, like:
One of the most useful features here is the waterfall chart that displays all the assets in a timeline, making it very easy to see where and what you need to optimize.
Pingdom focuses only on RUM and Synthetics but has no support for logs management which will inevitably leave you with understanding half the picture when debugging those pesky performance issues.
LogRocket enables you to rewind user sessions so you can see a replica of everything your users are seeing in real-time. Therefore, if your user encounters any issues, you can address them right away without requesting logs or screenshots.
Along with JavaScript errors and console logs, you can also look at the state and activities that took place at a certain moment. It displays the problematic bugs and errors as well as how to correct them.
You can track IP addresses and user agents for each session with LogRocket, which helps determine what browser users are using and diagnose issues particular to that browser. Custom properties can be added to logs, enabling the creation of user-value pairs that provide more information about users and sessions.
Within an hour, you can start running LogRocket on your servers or through:
They provide SDKs for many technologies and enable interaction with tools like:
Another useful frontend monitoring tool is Sematext Cloud. It provides a wide range of tools to help you:
Using the synthetic monitoring tool, you can design complex monitors for each of your resources. Additionally, each resource has a pinging frequency range of 10 minutes to an hour from multiple locations. Your website's loading times, error rates, SSL certificates, API availability, and other metrics will be reported.
With the addition of Sematext Experience, Sematext is now your go-to tool for reports on user experience and satisfaction and for providing important details about how your website or application is performing in various locations, devices, or connection speeds.
Sematext has two solutions built specifically for frontend performance monitoring, but one of its key differentiators is that it also has Sematext Logs. When you are attempting to troubleshoot the various performance issues and errors you could run into, this is helpful.
Prometheus is also an open-source monitoring solution that uses a time-series-based data model to store event-specific data. It comes with a query language, PromQL, that allows you to fetch data by writing custom SQL-like queries.
SpeedCurve captures data from real user interactions and benchmarks it against your competitors. This is a great way to stay ahead of the competition while making sure your users get the best possible experience while using your service.
Their real user monitoring tool, which they cleverly call LUX (which stands for Live User eXperience), gives you all the standard RUM metrics such as:
SpeedCurve allows you to set certain thresholds that they call budgets for all your metrics and then alert you if you exceed them. These alerts will go out via email or a webhook that can integrate with:
Their synthetic monitoring tool compiles all your metrics into a single view where you can check out your performance indicators to understand your website’s complexities further. The data is then broken down into seven other views that provide information on how the website loads in:
SpeedCurve also has a section powered by Lighthouse where your performance metrics are displayed and graded. It also provides recommendations on different actions you can take to improve your overall performance.
SpeedCurve does not support logs or transaction monitoring, and while you may be fine without these in the beginning, you’ll probably get a separate solution to help you track down the source of your issues and bugs.
Ongoing front-end monitoring offers several key essential benefits for maintaining a high-performing and reliable application. One of the standout advantages is proactive issue resolution. By continuously monitoring your application's front end, you can detect and address potential problems before they impact users. This proactive approach ensures that any issues are resolved quickly, helping to maintain a consistently high level of performance. Such issues include:
As your application grows and evolves, adapting to changes becomes crucial. With new features, updates, and shifts in user behavior, it’s important to stay agile. Continuous monitoring allows you to adapt smoothly, ensuring your application remains optimized and responsive no matter how much it changes over time.
Another significant benefit is the ability to make data-driven improvements. Ongoing monitoring provides a steady stream of data, which can be used to make informed decisions about optimizations and enhancements. This data-driven approach lets you fine-tune your application, improving the user experience and overall performance.
When your application performs reliably, it helps to build user trust. Users are likelier to stay loyal to a brand that consistently delivers a smooth and reliable experience. By ensuring your front end is always performing at its best, you foster greater confidence and trust in your brand.
Ongoing monitoring helps you stay competitive in a crowded market. With continuous insights into your front-end performance, you can keep your application on par with—or even ahead of—competitors. This ensures that your application meets the high standards users expect, helping you maintain a strong position in the market.
When selecting a frontend monitoring tool, it is crucial to ensure that it supports the programming languages and technologies used on your website. This compatibility is essential for accurate performance tracking. Without proper language support, the tool may miss essential metrics, rendering it ineffective in monitoring your application.
Prioritize cloud-based frontend monitoring solutions over on-premise solutions. Cloud-based tools are hosted on external servers by the provider, offering:
On the contrary, on-premise tools require:
Evaluate the monitoring tool's ease of use, including the:
A user-friendly tool simplifies navigation, monitoring parameter setup, and data interpretation. This streamlines the:
Choose between agent-based and agentless frontend monitoring based on your application’s needs. Agents are software components integrated into your application’s codebase, offering in-depth insights but requiring integration and maintenance. Agentless monitoring collects data remotely without installing software on your servers, simplifying setup but potentially providing less comprehensive data.
Pay close attention to the security features of front-end monitoring tools. Security, in this context, involves:
A breach in monitoring data could compromise user data and expose vulnerabilities. To ensure the security of your monitoring tool, assess factors like:
Consider the pricing model of the monitoring tool. Different tools offer various pricing structures, including:
Ensure that your budget aligns with the chosen plan and understand the features included in each pricing tier. Evaluate how pricing may scale as your application grows and whether the tool’s features justify the cost. Striking a balance between features, budget, and scalability ensures optimal value from your front-end monitoring tool.
Alerty is a cloud monitoring service designed for developers and early-stage startups, offering a range of tools to monitor application performance, databases, and incident management. It's like having a watchful eye on your system, ready to alert you at the first sign of trouble.
Alerty supports various technologies like:
By monitoring databases like Supabase, PostgreSQL, and RDS, it tracks essential metrics such as CPU usage and memory consumption. This ensures that your system stays healthy and performs optimally.
Alerty features quick incident management, ensuring you can promptly address any issues. Real User Monitoring (RUM) provides insights into user behavior, helping you optimize your application's user experience. Knowing how users interact with your app enables you to make informed decisions to enhance their journey.
Universal Service Monitoring covers dependencies such as:
Alerty leverages artificial intelligence to simplify setup and deliver a cost-effective solution compared to its competitors. This makes it an attractive option for developers and small teams looking for efficient, affordable monitoring.
Alerty integrates with tools like Sentry, streamlining your workflow and reducing the time spent on monitoring tasks. Its user-friendly interface makes setup a breeze, allowing you to start monitoring your systems quickly. This simplicity makes Alerty ideal for tech teams looking for hassle-free monitoring solutions.
With Alerty by your side, you can catch issues before they impact your users, keeping your applications running smoothly. Its NextJS logging tool is invaluable for developers seeking reliable and efficient monitoring. Use Alerty today and gain peace of mind knowing that your systems are safe.