Observability for Frontend Engineers

Abstract

Observability is the ability to measure a system’s current state. Backend engineers are becoming more familiar with the three pillars of observability and technologies such as OpenTelemetry that can be used to instrument applications and diagnose issues. Yet, in the front-end world, we’re behind the curve.

Join me as I explore the tools and techniques we can use to instrument, monitor, and diagnose issues in our production front-end applications. I’ll cover RUM agents, the metrics and traces they provide, and how to combine them with backend tracing for a holistic picture. These concepts will be reinforced using the Elastic RUM agent and the OpenTelemetry Node.js agent. In addition, I’ll cover Synthetic Monitoring and alerting in Observability platforms can help us detect issues impacting users in the UIs we build and maintain using Playwright and Elastic Synthetics.