Developing an application is as important as monitoring it to keep it running healthy for optimal user experience. A superb monitoring strategy is a must for your business to succeed so that you never have to worry about metrics like consistent performance, high availability, and accessibility. Many businesses overlook the importance of front-end monitoring for their applications.
Monitoring is an integral part of their operational efforts. They usually leave that to an Ops engineer or sysadmin for that matter. This practice may be unhealthy as it can overburden the workers and create loopholes.
It is better to monitor applications from the beginning.
But why frontend?
Software architecture can be divided into two major components: front and backend.
Frontend includes application components that can be executed and parsed on the client’s side via mobile or web interfaces.
When a webpage is loaded, components such as HTML, CSS JavaScript, or images are loaded. End-users now have access to more sophisticated and powerful interfaces and applications. This also invites the possibility that things could go wrong.
Any downtime in the app’s front end could result in severe losses. This includes revenue, resources, and most importantly, customer satisfaction. In addition to complexity, The front end is more complex due to frequent updates, changing frameworks, and the increasing number of end-users visiting different devices, locations, ISPs, and browsers.
Besides, uptime monitoring also is not sufficient for SaaS or eCommerce businesses that deal with large audiences. They can’t risk the performance of their application because it’s their business.
What is front-end application monitoring?
Frontend application monitoring is the process of identifying and fixing errors, as well as maintaining the health of web apps.
This is done in order to improve user experience and eliminate any errors that could cause harm to your application. It is possible to catch errors in the early stages, which will be easier for your developers. They can then work on improving and debugging the code.
It is not to be confused with Application Performance Monitoring. because it focuses on the ultimate result that your users see when they open your application.
Type of issues
JavaScript errors
A majority of applications are based on JavaScript to achieve functionality. As a result, Front-end monitoring is based on the goal of identifying JavaScript errors.
It is possible to do so by following these steps You should also identify the frequency of these errors that pops up along with considering the severity of their impact.
Framework-specific issues
Frameworks such as Angular or React are powerful and make developers’ lives easier. Frontend application monitoring tools can identify issues based on the functionalities of frameworks. For example, it can determine the state of the application.
Network request failure
Websites and web applications can be integrated with external solutions to provide additional functions. They make large numbers of requests to the server hosting them. Monitoring tools can be used to record the HTTP requests and the responses of the user in order to identify errors.
Performance issues
Monitoring tools may also be able to track app performance metrics such as average page loading times, time-to-first-paint, average response time, and many other things.
User experience problems
A user clicks a few elements quickly and performs “rage clicks”. The tools can be used to monitor this. They can also make sure elements are correctly rendered and detect when the user is stuck in a navigation loop.
In other words, is required to build an application. You need to keep it up-to-date so that your customers aren’t frustrated by any problems.
Frontend monitoring increases the functionality, availability, speed, and security of your applications. It is essential to use a high-quality tool to monitor all of these aspects. Let’s take a look at some of the top tools on the market.
Also read: 10 Types of APIs Error Status Codes and How to Fix?
Top 5 Application Monitoring Tools
1. Sentry
Sentry is a popular error-monitoring software that was created in the early 1990s. It has many amazing features that can solve multiple problems.
You can also identify the root cause of the error and save time debugging. This feature is available on both the server and client sides.
Sentry will tell you what you need to know in order to find errors and correct them based on the context. Sentry can associate errors with specific releases. This context defines the error environment. It includes language and operating systems. You can also create custom contexts depending on the business or application.
The release allows you to see who and when the bug or error occurred. It also gives additional context, such as commit data. This helps you understand both first-time and previously addressed errors. Sentry allows you to automatically assign new errors to your team.
The dashboard allows you to visualize errors, including graphs of spikes and events. It also includes maps for release and geographic mapping. You can get alerts via SMS, email, or chat about bugs. You can use distributed tracing for multiple projects to track errors, source maps of Node and JS, and use a custom query maker.
Sentry provides security through two-factor authorization, audit logs, certified privacy shields, SOC-2 certification, SSL encryption, and COPPA compliance.
It can integrate with most languages and frameworks including JavaScript and Python, NodeJS and Ruby, Django and Go, C & C++ and Java, Android, GitHub, and GitLab.
You can try Sentry free of charge or pay $26/month for a premium version.
2. Airbrake
Airbrake allows for monitoring of application performance, deployments, and errors. It’s lightweight and easy to set up and run. It notifies you immediately if an error occurs in your app.
Breadcrumbs and Backtraces can help you pinpoint the root cause which will help you to identify the cause of the error and simplify its fix. Airbrake makes it easier to diagnose problems faster by allowing you to see the context and prioritize errors.
It monitors your technology stack and can provide insights and hotspots that help identify potential risks. Its deployment tracking helps to fix bad deploys and prevent future problems. Airbrake integrates seamlessly with tools such as GitLab.
Airbrake is free to try, or you can choose a paid plan starting from $19/month.
3. LogRocket
This tool is unique in that it can record user sessions so you can get a better understanding of what caused the error. LogRocket allows you to playback user sessions, So you can see every detail in a pixel-perfect way, no matter what your users may be able to view in real-time.
If your user encounters any problems, you can easily fix them without asking for logs and screenshots. You can view network activity including requests and responses.
You can also view the state and actions of a particular time period, JavaScript errors, and console logs. This shows you the most important bugs and errors, as well as the steps to fix them.
LogRocket allows you to track IP addresses and user agent tracking for each session. This is useful in providing information about the browser they use and troubleshooting specific browser problems. Logs can be infused with custom properties, which allow you to create user-value pairings that provide more information about users and sessions.
LogRocket can be installed on-premise or in AWS, GCP, or Azure within minutes. They offer SDKs for different technologies and allow integration with React, Angular, Plain JS and Redux, Vue.js, and Ember as well as tools such as Salesforce and Drift, Sentry and Rollbar, Intercom, and Trello.
For 10k sessions, you can choose between a free or paid plan starting at $99/month
4. Rollbar
The Rollbar mature error-tracking tool that was founded in 2012 and has since grown to be one of the most popular on the market. It can monitor errors across a variety of platforms. Instead of spending your time looking for errors, you can spend it improving codes to feel safer.
Rollbar automates error monitoring and triaging so developers can quickly fix bugs while creating software. Rollbar provides real-time results and stacks trace against local variables. It reduces the time between quality assurance and development.
Bug reports can be obtained which will help you to prioritize issues that could impact your test cases and make the necessary changes. Rollbar supports iOS and Android platforms and languages such as APEX and Ruby, PHP, and Java. You can also find both paid and free plans here.
Also read: Top 10 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Tools
5. AppSignal
Five monitoring tools in one with the AppSignal, which combines its features to provide you with complete visibility of your application.
It includes five types of monitoring:
- To detect errors and prevent them from happening again, error tracking is used.
- App performance monitoring for fine-tuning
- Server monitoring for running healthy applications on optimal hardware
- You can use Metric Dashboards to gather real-time metrics, and then visualize them in your dashboard.
- Alerts for any anomaly detection and setting triggers
AppSignal supports the following frameworks and languages: Ruby, Node.js Ruby, and JavaScript. It’s easy to use and takes 5 minutes or less to install. They will automatically create an intuitive dashboard to display performance information and notify you if there are any exceptions.
They have appointed Rust as AppSignal’s agent, which is lightweight and stable and has empowered thousands of apps.
The monitoring system is guaranteed to be up and running at 99.999%. This means that your app will never go down during its watch. AppSignal also conforms to GDPR.
AppSignal costs $19 per month for 250k requests. You also get a 30-day trial for no cost with unlimited requests
Bonus Point
6. Raygun
Raygun makes it easy to fix errors and keep control of all the chaos surrounding your software. This allows you to quickly diagnose problems in your codebase and ensures users get error-free experiences, and lets you enjoy fast development cycles.
You can quickly identify all errors in your application. The error report provides detailed diagnostic information about the root cause. This helps you fix problems faster and maintain a seamless user experience.
You can also see the stack trace, browser version, environment, OS host, class name, and other information. You can also identify the commit or release that introduced the issue. Raygun lets you create custom dashboards that track metrics in the way you like and display error rates and regressions related to new codes.
Reports can be scheduled according to specific crash reporting information, scrub sensitive information, or PII information. You can integrate Raygun with tools such as Slack and Bitbucket, GitHub, and JIRA, as well as frameworks such as Angular, React, and Vue.js. Ember, JavaScript, and many more.
Pricing starts at $19/month
Last Line — Application monitoring tools
It takes creativity and a lot of resources to build an application. It is not a good idea to let your application performance and functionality down by failing to maintain it. Don’t worry, you can use any of the error monitoring tools above to locate errors and fix them so that your application runs at maximum performance every time.
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