The Shifting Landscape of Modern Application Stacks
The modern application stack is undergoing a seismic shift, with the center of gravity moving towards the frontend. The demand for rich, performant user interfaces, scalable infrastructure, and increased developer productivity has led to the deployment of new application architectures. As a result, stateful single-page frontends now communicate with disparate microservices, serverless functions, smart CDNs, and third-party APIs.
The Challenges of Monitoring Modern Applications
While this shift has undoubtedly improved end-user experience and application availability, it has introduced a new set of challenges to monitoring applications. Understanding performance in web apps is notoriously difficult, with slow API calls, heavy client-side JavaScript, and complex user flows making it a constant struggle to ensure applications perform well and offer an excellent user experience.
The Limitations of Traditional APM Tools
Traditional APM tools, designed for monitoring monolithic server-side apps, have added browser SDKs as frontends grew more complex. However, their frontend telemetry is limited, focusing mostly on page loads, resource timings, and JavaScript errors. Many teams find that their alerting is too noisy, with too many false positives, and they don’t capture enough context to help them understand the actual impact of technical issues on the end user.
The Unique Challenges of Frontend Monitoring
Monitoring frontend and backend applications are vastly different processes. In modern single-page apps, performance is affected by a multitude of factors, including network requests, JavaScript execution, local resource access, CPU load, and memory usage. Slowness can be introduced from the backend, CDN layer, internet connectivity, JavaScript performance, or client device.
Introducing LogRocket Metrics
To address these challenges, we’re excited to announce LogRocket Metrics, our first step towards a frontend APM solution that directly helps you understand and improve your application’s performance. LogRocket Metrics ties together session replay and APM in an easy-to-use dashboarding tool that anyone on your team can use, regardless of technical ability.
Frontend Performance Monitoring
LogRocket Metrics captures CPU usage, memory usage, browser crashes, and initial page load times, helping you understand how your app is performing on the frontend. You can look at aggregate performance across your whole application or drill down and understand performance on particular pages or flows.
Analyzing Complex Flows
LogRocket makes it quick and easy to gauge performance of complex flows using our “Time Between Events” metric, which can measure time between clicks on a certain button, page loads, network requests, or custom events.
Understanding Impact
Graphs and charts are critical for getting a high-level view of how an application is performing, but often, it can be difficult to understand how performance numbers and network errors actually affect your user experience. LogRocket lets you jump from any graph directly into actual user sessions, allowing you to see the video of what users experienced and immediately understand and empathize with the quality of their user experience.
Debugging User-Reported Issues
Within a user’s session replay, LogRocket now lets you see CPU usage, memory usage, and network request timings alongside the session video to help you understand why your application was slow.
Alerting
With any metric you create, LogRocket lets you set up alerting over Slack, email, or webhooks if a given threshold is crossed.
The Future of Frontend Development
In addition to officially announcing LogRocket Metrics, we’re excited to share that we’ve raised an additional $15 million in Series B funding to continue our mission of helping teams build amazing applications. The shift towards rich single-page apps has undoubtedly improved both user experience quality and developer productivity. But with greater complexity comes the need for more observability.