Looking for Frontend Monitoring Tools? Well, here is the list of the Top 10 Frontend Monitoring Tools in 2023.
Monitoring the performance of an application is not a strange concept to most developers. At one point or another, we’ve all had to do some performance debugging of our own. Usually, it happens when there’s a big issue affecting the user’s experience or cost implications. Only then do we make time to look at how the app performs in different scenarios?
Of course, there are different parts of the application that you can, and should, monitor separately. Most people split an app between front-end and back-end and to save time, we’ll do the same. This article will focus on front-end performance monitoring and the tools you can use to do it. Below we have reviewed some of the best frontend performance monitoring SaaS to help you get started.
But first things first.
What Is Frontend Application Monitoring?
Frontend monitoring is the process to track and maintain the health of the presentation layer of your applications. It’s everything that a user would interact with, from the content and menu to APIs and other client-facing components.
Application performance monitoring, or APM, focuses on what users experience rather than the communication between server and client. While both are worth keeping an eye on, understanding how the users interact with your application is crucial in delivering a good experience, which leads me to my next point.
With help of Frontend Monitoring Tools, you can monitor your apps easily and in detail. Check the list of the best frontend framework as well to choose the right one for your project.
Are Frontend Monitoring Tools Important?
Absolutely! We use many different frontend monitoring tools and techniques to monitor our backend, databases, infrastructure, and frontend shouldn’t be any different. As the complexity of our websites and applications increases, the monitoring needs are going up too.
Twenty years ago, you might have gotten away with just pinging your server a couple of times a day. Today that’s nowhere near enough. Any downtime or degradation of the performance of your website can have severe consequences.
While working with front-end frameworks, it is advisable to use the Front End tools for better web app performance.
Before you go through the tools check some other useful tools collection: JavaScript Build Tools, Open Source Web Development Tools,
Now, let’s begin the collection of Frontend monitoring tools…!!
Sentry
Sentry tells when your application is crashing or going too slow and how the application 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 would have eventually led to the error. We use this tool for monitoring the Materio Vuejs Admin template.
The Performance view lets you understand how many transactions are getting triggered, and how long they take and show you an Apdex score, which, as I mentioned earlier, is the ratio of both tolerable and satisfactory response times compared to all the response times.
While Sentry has support for 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.
Pricing: 30-day Free trial, Paid plans are from $29 to $2120/month depending on the number of errors monitored, transactions, and the size of the field attached to those errors.
Features:
- Easy installation
- Uses Google’s Web vitals to provide details on performance
- Transaction tracing
Sematext Cloud
Sematext Cloud is another good frontend monitoring tool needs. It offers a wide array of tools to help you monitor your performance, and availability, debug errors and keep a close eye on your infrastructure while you are at it.
The synthetic monitoring tool allows you to create complex monitors for all your resources. Also, Each resource can be pinged from multiple locations with a frequency of 10 minutes up to an hour. This will report back on your website speed, error rates, SSL certificates, API availability, and more.
Besides, with the addition of Sematext Experience, Sematext is the go-to tool for you whenever you need reports on the experience and satisfaction of your users while providing critical pieces of information as to how your website or application is performing in different locations, devices, or different connection speeds.
One of the major differentiators of Sematext is that besides the two products created focused on frontend performance monitoring, it also has Sematext Logs. This comes in handy when you are trying to debug the different performance issues and errors you might encounter.
Price: 14-day trial, $9/month for Sematext Experience, $29/month for Synthetics
Features:
- A unified location for all your logs, metrics, and events
- Identify resources & requests with the biggest negative impact on your website performance
- Real-time alerts and debugging solutions
- Support for all major frameworks
- Very well-documented features
AppSignal
AppSignal provides insights into your performance for both the front-end and the background jobs, has host monitoring, and error tracking, and allows you to collect metrics from your app. You can also keep an eye on payload sizes, database queries, revenue, and many more with easily customizable dashboards.
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 them. You’ll see details about CPU usage, memory allocation, and network information, as well as an Event Timeline that shows details on what the code is doing. This allows you to understand what part of your application is taxing your performance and what areas need improvement.
It features an anomaly detection system that comes with a few prebuilt alerts that trigger whenever things aren’t exactly working as they should. This is useful when you are just starting and are unsure what to look for or when you are under a heavy load, and there are too many things to keep track of.
While AppSignal is easy to use and implement, it does lack advanced logging and infrastructure monitoring, which will leave you with a few big questions. You’ll be able to see all your front-end performance details, but half of the picture will be blank.
Price: 30-day trial and simple pricing based on requests that start at $19 per month for 250K requests going up to 2500M for $2249/month.
Features:
- Anomaly detection
- Out-of-the-box alerts
- Easy installation
- Simple pricing
Site24x7
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 server monitoring, cloud management, RUM, and more.
When it comes to front-end 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.
I’d be remiss if I wouldn’t mention their RUM tool. It helps you understand what your users are experiencing, the device and what browsers they are using, and where they are located.
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.
Site24x7 offers a 30-day trial period with no credit card required and has four plans starting at $10 and going all the way up to $499 per month.
Features:
– All-in-one monitoring solution
– Comprehensive API transaction monitoring
– Real user monitoring tool
Pingdom
Pingdom (owned by SolarWinds) is an uptime monitoring service with a wide range of features, including SSL monitoring, uptime monitoring, and real-user monitoring, amongst many others. 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 load time, page size, number of requests, and a Performance score, which will paint a simple picture of how your overall performance looks 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 comes with a 14-day trial period, and their pro plans start at $15/month for synthetic monitoring with 10 uptime monitors, 1 advanced monitor, and 50 SMS notifications, while their real user monitoring service is $15/ month for 100K page views.
Features:
– Simple pricing
– Real user monitoring tools
– SMS and email notifications
– Customizable alerts
Raygun
With Raygun, you can see and resolve your performance bottlenecks by discovering actionable data from your website. This will make it easy to diagnose poor experiences and boost front-end performance.
If the goal is to solve performance issues with Raygun, then you better get used to their real user monitoring platform, as it will be your main tool to diagnose frontend issues. Their lightweight JavaScript SDK monitors all aspects of your website by gathering information like page speed, load times, the number of active sessions, and active users.
Furthermore, you can walk through individual user sessions in real-time, and trace their path to identify which page loads slowly or didn’t load at all. Every page load has a detailed resource waterfall that allows you to see a breakdown of every asset and how they affect frontend performance. You can then extrapolate the aspects causing the performance issues which will give you an idea of how to fix them.
Raygun doesn’t have a logs management solution but the Error view does provide details like the full stack trace, environment, browser, OS, host, and more.
Raygun has three packages, APM starting at $8/mo, which includes 10K traces, Real User Monitoring at $8 for 10K sessions, and Error Monitoring and Reporting at $4/mo. You can also test-drive all their features for 14 days using their free trial.
Features:
– Real user monitoring tools
– User-friendly application
– Simple to understand pricing
– 3rd Party integrations
SpeedCurve
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 first input delay, Largest Contentful Paint, or Cumulative Layout Shift.
Besides, it 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 Slack, HipChat, Microsoft Teams, and many more.
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 intricacies further. The data is then broken down into seven other views that provide information on how the website loads in different browsers and devices, responsiveness, third-party resources, JavaScript, and a breakdown of the loaded assets.
SpeedCurve also has a section powered by Lighthouse where your performance metrics are displayed and graded. Besides that, it provides recommendations on different actions you can take to improve your overall performance.
Price: $143/month up to $2100, $15/month plus a free trial that lets you test-drive all their features.
Features:
- Real user monitoring tools
- User-friendly UI
- Easy Setup
- Simple pricing
LogRocket
When you first pick it up, LogRocket can look quite different from the tools you’re used to, but that might not necessarily be a bad thing. It’s a real user monitoring tool that lets you record the user’s session and play it back.
A developer mode lets you break down every resource that the user loaded. There’s also a console log that records what the user saw at the time of the incident which will help you see the issue without having to worry about replicating it yourself. If you’ve ever used the Chrome developer tools, you’ll feel right at home.
LogRocket has a basic alerting system that notifies via Slack or email whenever a new error appears. It is also possible to customize to be fired on particular errors or after a certain number of errors happen.
Price: 14-day trial, a free tier with 30 days retention and 1000 sessions, Pro version starting at $99 with 10k sessions/month.
Features:
- Inspect logs, network activity, and Dom elements
- Intercom and Zendesk support
- Video playback of the incidents
Azure Monitor
Azure Application Insights comes as a feature of Azure Monitor provided by Microsoft Azure. It is extensible using the SDK or using the Application Insights Agent.
This tool can monitor the live application and detect performance anomalies with request rates, response times, and failure rates. Using the aggregated statistics and the stack traces provided, the developers can also analyze the server and browser exceptions reported.
For frontend monitoring, you can integrate its JavaScript SDK into your application.
Azure Monitor includes:
- Detect and diagnose issues across applications and dependencies with Application Insights.
- Correlate infrastructure issues with VM insights and Container insights.
- Drill into your monitoring data with Log Analytics for troubleshooting and deep diagnostics.
- Support operations at scale with smart alerts and automated actions.
- Create visualizations with Azure dashboards and workbooks.
- Collect data from monitored resources using Azure Monitor Metrics.
Rollbar
With Rollbar, errors will be automatically logged as tickets in tools like Jira by setting up automated issue tracking and assigning to owners directly within Rollbar.
Rollbar’s real-time feed of errors enables the developers to address the critical errors affecting key customers occurring at low initial frequencies, which are otherwise difficult to detect.
Rollbar provides AI-assisted workflows which enable the developer to take immediate action on errors before they impact users. It presents data like the number of customers affected by the error, the type of platforms or browsers affected, and whether similar errors have occurred before or if a solution already exists.
Besides, Rollbar automatically starts identifying the recent deployment, which can be the reason behind the error to source code, stack trace, and the commits. This enables the developer to identify and view the differences quickly.
The automation-grade grouping feature automatically groups similar errors to reduce noise. The grouping rules can be easily customized, or errors can be manually merged to keep the alerts relevant.
Companies like Adobe, Uber, and twitch use RollBar. Also, it provides SDKs for many languages and frameworks, including Node.js, Angular, React,Vue.js, .NET, Ruby, and Python.
Conclusion:
So, here was the collection of the top 10+ Frontend Monitoring Tools in 2023. Well, it is necessary to keep in check your applications as they are the link to your customers and your growth. So, to have a loyal customer base, you’ll have to provide the best service.
In the web development world, bugs and errors are something that continuously buzzes web developers. So, we have gathered here some of the best front-end monitoring tools.
These Front-end monitoring tools will help you speed up your application’s performance. Also, they will keep your app bugs and error-free. Do tell us which tool you use in the comment section below.
If you are looking for javascript specific tools, then you can check the collection of JavaScript Build Tools.
