Observe links end-user experience with back-end troubleshooting

Observe has bolstered its observability platform with frontend monitoring capabilities that it says will enable developers and IT teams to gain visibility into application performance on end-user browsers and mobile applications.

Frontend Observability is designed to give IT teams the ability to identify and diagnose application performance issues based on how the apps behave for end users. Using open-source agents and OpenTelemetry-based software development kits (SDK) to collect data from browsers and mobile applications, Frontend Observability can monitor application performance and collect data that will help IT teams correlate frontend performance problems with backend services, according to Observe.

“To deliver great user experiences, DevOps teams need to see the big picture of how people interact with their applications, and how this relates to backend systems,” Observe CEO Jeremy Burton said in a statement. “Observe’s new Frontend Observability is based on OpenTelemetry and open-source agents so there is no vendor lock-in. Observability now starts with the moment a customer interacts with an application so DevOps teams can pull a thread through the entire stack in order to determine impact and root cause of any issues.”

Frontend Observability uses a capability called Browser Real User Monitoring (RUM) to enable IT and developer teams to quickly identify and diagnose performance issues across browsers, devices, and locations. For instance, RUM identifies anomalies in page load times, core web vitals, and JavaScript or HTTP errors. RUM also provides developers visibility into mobile app performance and mobile user experiences.

“Developers increasingly view end-user experience as essential to an application’s success,” said Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at industry analyst firm RedMonk, in a statement. “With the shift toward client-side interactivity, they now demand broader insights into user interactions in order to optimize performance.”

Observe is a SaaS platform, and customers deploy Observe agents to collect telemetry data. The agents can collect data from a variety of sources, including infrastructure such as Kubernetes, databases such as MongoDB or Snowflake, and other applications. The agents collect time-series data, logs, traces/spans, and performance data from these various sources and send the data to Observe’s platform. Observe then takes the raw telemetry data, curates and normalizes it, and structures it to make it more easily navigable and usable for troubleshooting by customer teams.

“Modern web applications have gotten super complex. Users access your site from countless different devices, browsers, or geo locations,” wrote Amit Sharma, vice president of product marketing at Observe, in a blog post announcing the news. “Frontend Observability bridges this gap by connecting what happens in your users’ browsers and mobile apps with what’s happening on your backend services and infrastructure.”

According to Observe, Browser RUM is available today, Mobile RUM is available in private preview, and Observe customers can begin using Frontend Observability at no additional licensing cost.