Monitoring application performance is not a foreign concept to most developers. In some cases, we have to do some performance debugging ourselves. Often, application performance needs to be monitored when there are major issues that affect user experience or cost. It also takes time to see how the app performs in different scenarios.

Generally, application monitoring is carried out in different ways. Generally, application programs are composed of front-end and back-end. Therefore, monitoring is usually handled according to the front-end and back-end monitoring methods, and monitoring indicators are also different. This article will focus on front-end performance monitoring and more popular monitoring tools, for the need to develop related tools partners can learn from the implementation of these tools.

What is front-end application monitoring?

Front-end monitoring is the process and tools developers use to track and maintain the health of an application’s presentation layer. It’s basically everything a user will interact with, from content and menus to apis and other front-end oriented components.

Application performance monitoring (APM) focuses on the user experience, not the communication between the server and the front end. While both are worthy of attention, understanding how users interact with the application is critical to providing a good experience.

Is front-end monitoring important?

The answer is yes, we use many different monitoring tools and technologies to monitor the back-end, database, memory, CPU, and other infrastructure, and the front-end monitoring is no different. As the complexity of front-end web sites and applications increases, so does the need for monitoring. In the past, monitoring only needed to ping the server a few times a day to ensure that it was working properly. These days, that’s not enough, and any downtime, slow requests, and other things that degrade the performance of your site and your application can have serious consequences. At the same time, users have higher requirements for the application experience than in the past, and any bad experience will have a negative impact on users.

What performance problems can be solved?

When measuring application performance, it is recommended to focus on three areas:

speed

In today’s superior network environment, speed is a more important indicator. Slow loading of resources can lead to bottlenecks and a poor user experience, so it’s important to address them as quickly as possible. So how fast should a good website be? How slow is not acceptable to users? You can use PageSpeed to test your site’s loading speed.

A slow-loading page can frustrate users so much that even an extra second can cause jump rates to spike and search for solutions elsewhere.

How fast should websites and applications be? The following is a description of key indicators for reference:

  • Less than 100 milliseconds is considered instantaneous;
  • Delays of 100ms to 300ms are perceptible;
  • One second is the limit of the user’s thoughts without interruption;
  • Users want the site to load in 2 seconds;
  • After 3 seconds, 40% of your visitors will abandon your site;
  • Ten seconds is the limit of attention.
Tools for client performance

Most front-end applications now spend more time in the browser than on the server because new applications use JavaScript frameworks such as Vue, React, and AngularJS.

These feature-rich front ends add a new layer of measurement. Therefore, measuring the rendering time of an application running on the client’s local computer becomes critical.

  • Google PageSpeed Insights: Analyze web content and generate recommendations to make your pages load faster. Reducing page load times reduces bounce rates and improves conversion rates.
  • Google Lighthouse: An open source automation tool for improving the quality of web pages. Your front-end developers should at least use the Lighthouse metric, which is available in the Google Chrome browser tools.
  • Sitespeed. IO: an open source tool that analyzes web Sitespeed and performance based on performance best practices and timing metrics. You can analyze a site, analyze and compare multiple sites.

Teams can’t always modify applications to optimize client performance. Fortunately, Google provides ngx_Pagespeed and mod_pagespeed as Web server extensions to automatically improve performance without the need to modify the code.

Here’s how these two Extensions are used:

  • Google Ngx_Pagespeed speeds up websites and reduces page load times. This open source Nginx server module automatically applies Web performance best practices pages and related assets (CSS, JavaScript, images) to this Pagespeed tool without modifying existing content or workflow.

  • Google mod_pagespeed speeds up your website and reduces page load time. This open source Apache HTTP server module automatically applies Web performance best practices to pages and related assets (CSS, JavaScript, images) without requiring you to modify existing content or workflow.

  • WebPagetest.org provides insight into client performance in a variety of real-world browsers. This tool can test web pages in any browser, anywhere, under any network condition, and it is free.

Errors and features

I’m not talking about obvious errors like 404 or 503. It’s a less obvious error, like a third-party API rejecting a connection or sending an HTTP request when it should be sending an HTTPS request. These problems can lead to significant service disruptions that can ruin the user experience.

When you run into a problem with your website or app, whether it’s a JavaScript bug, a network glitch, or a frame-specific issue, there’s a tool that alerts you and allows you to optimize your site or app. Using a log management tool, such as Sematext Logs, you will find it easier to identify and fix problems you encounter.

While some of the problems can be resolved using the information provided in the console logs, some of them are not so easy to resolve. In some cases, the log will have only one location, but more often, the log will be in a different location, have different timestamps, and may have different redundancy, which can make debugging very complicated.

Having a tool to store, archive, and control log quality is critical to understanding the big picture. Separate solutions can be used, but logging and monitoring on a single platform can make troubleshooting critical problems faster and easier.

availability

I don’t mean the obvious, but if a site needs to be online and functional, usability is critical, especially as the platform grows large enough to have more users around the world. Insight into how users experience the site can be very helpful, and this requires tools to monitor the experience of real users.

The real user monitoring tool tracks the progress of users throughout the application, providing information about how they interact with the application and what responses they will receive. Based on these UX metrics, you will be able to determine whether you need a faster machine, better scalability, or have to optimize your business logic.

The best tool for monitoring application and website performance

1, AppSignal

AppSignal provides insight into the performance of front-end and back-end jobs, host monitoring, error tracking, and tools that allow metrics to be gathered from applications. You can focus on payload sizes, database queries, revenue, and much more through an easy-to-customize dashboard.

AppSignal is easy to install with the help of a lightweight Rust-enabled agent. It monitors the performance of an application and displays a simple classification of the operations it records and the metrics associated with them. You can see details about CPU usage, memory allocation, and network information, as well as an event timeline that shows details about what the code actually does. This allows you to understand which parts of your application are affecting performance and which areas need improvement.

It also has an exception detection system that can pre-build alerts that are triggered when everything is not working properly. This is useful when you’re not sure what to look for at first, or when you’re under a heavy load and have too much to keep track of.

Although AppSignal is easy to use and implement, its lack of advanced logging and infrastructure monitoring features presents some big problems. You can see all the front-end performance details, but half of them are blank.

AppSignal has a 30-day trial and simple pricing, starting at $19 per month for 250,000 requests, up to $2,500 for 2.5 billion requests, starting at $2,249 per month.

Features:

  • Anomaly detection
  • Alerts out of the box
  • Simple and easy to install
  • Simple pricing

2, Sentry

Sentry provides project teams with tools to detect and resolve errors and other issues that affect the user experience. It is open source and completely free, with the same benefits as the paid version. It has been introduced in “Implementation Scheme of Front-end Abnormal Monitoring Platform”.

Sentry tells you when your application is crashing or running too slowly, as well as the performance of your application, allowing you to drill down into areas that need attention. In addition to fixing the error, you can also fix the problem that ultimately led to the error.

Features:

  • Simple and easy to install
  • Leverage Google’s Web elements to provide detailed information about performance
  • Transaction tracking

3, Site24x7

Site24x7 allows you to see alternative ways in which applications or projects run in the real world. As a usability and user experience monitoring solution, Site24x7 offers many neat features such as server monitoring, cloud management, RUM, and more.

When it comes to front-end performance monitoring, Site24x7 has a Web section where you can create a monitor for your site or API. These monitors perform pings on the resources you need to collect data such as availability, response time, downtime, and so on.

Site24x7 will also track SLA compliance in the REST API section, which will come in handy. This view displays details of availability and response by location, a history of all details that occurred in the last 24 hours, and throughput and response time details. In addition, Site24x7 monitors SSL and TLS certificates and domain expiration and notifies you when a certificate expires or something goes wrong.

Site24x7 offers a 30-day trial, no credit cards required, and four plans starting at $10 and going up to $499 a month.

Features:

  • All-in-one monitoring solution
  • Comprehensive API transaction monitoring
  • Real user monitoring tools

4, Pingdom

Pingdom is an uptime monitoring service with a variety of features, including SSL monitoring, uptime monitoring, and actual user monitoring. With a flexible alert system, Pingdom will notify you when service is interrupted or degraded.

The uptime monitoring view will provide insight into how long it takes for a page or resource to fully load. If an error occurs, their event reporting manager can be used to drill down into the transaction to find the root cause of the problem. Traceroute is very useful in this situation.

For performance reporting, whenever you need detailed information on your site (such as load time, page size, request ID, and performance score), use the “page Speed” section, which simply Outlines overall performance. One of the most useful features is the waterfall diagram, which shows all the assets on the timeline, so it’s easy to see what needs to be optimized and what needs to be optimized.

With a 14-day trial period, Pingdom’s professional program starts at $15 a month for comprehensive monitoring, including 10 uptime monitors, 1 advanced monitor, and 50 SMS notifications, compared to $15 a month for real user monitoring (per 100K page views).

Features:

  • Simple pricing
  • Real user monitoring tools
  • SMS and email notifications
  • Customizable alert

conclusion

It is important to acknowledge that performance is not a one-time checklist when building a website or application. Getting it right takes time and effort, and it’s an ongoing process. Monitoring front-end performance will require special tools to ensure the best possible 24×7 experience for users.