Frontend Observability

The Frontend Observability integration helps you monitor and understand the performance and reliability of your web and mobile applications. By capturing data from open-source browser and mobile instrumentation libraries, it provides visibility into page load times, user interactions, errors, and performance bottlenecks. These data integrations lay the foundation for correlating frontend performance with backend services, helping teams identify and resolve issues that impact user experience.

Installing the integration

Reach out to Observe support to enable the frontend observability integration.

Use case: troubleshoot a latency issue in a web application

Start with the Browser/Site Home dashboard, and filter it to your specific application.

Check throughput, response times, core web vitals, and errors across the app using the dashboard.

  • See if any of the metrics varies by geo or page.

  • Select a transaction from the throughput chart and pivot to Transaction search for that route.

  • Use the waterfall to understand the sequence of resource loads and backend calls, and to identify where the bottenecks are.

  • Pivot to a backend trace using the table below the waterfall to continue troubleshooting issues with instrumented backend services.

For single page applications (SPAs):

  • The Site Home dashboard uses page load transactions only. To understand the performance of route changes or user interactions that did not involve a new page load, use the Transaction Search dashboard filtered to your app and transaction_type is route-change or user-interaction.

Use case: monitor and drill into errors across the whole web frontend

Start with the Browser/Site Home.

Go to the “Errors/Exceptions” card to see issues across the whole web frontend, sorted by frequency of occurrence. Click the stack trace column to see an expanded detailed stack trace of the exception that generated the issue.

Use case: understand browser user sessions

Use the Browser/Session Search dashboard to find user sessions and view a list of session activity (i.e., transactions that occurred in that session). Click a transaction to inspect it more closely.

View mobile user data

Use the Mobile/Mobile RUM to see logs, metrics, and spans from your mobile applications.

Reference: integration content

Datasets installed with this integration:

  • Browser/Error

  • Browser/Event

  • Browser/External Call

  • Browser/Service Metrics

  • Browser/Session

  • Browser/Site

  • Browser/Span

  • Browser/Transaction

  • Mobile/Mobile RUM

Dashboards installed with this integration:

  • Browser/Session Search

  • Browser/Site Home

  • Browser/Transaction Performance

  • Browser/Transaction Search

  • Browser/User Session

  • Mobile/App Logs

  • Mobile/App Metrics

  • Mobile/Span