Best JavaScript Application Monitoring Tools in 2024

Application Monitoring Tools prevent uncaught exceptions and errors from going unnoticed. Most tools offer automated instrumentation, enabling your application to recognize and ship the error messages for further processing automatically.

Most Web applications are made using JavaScript. It's around 95% of websites. So most issues occurring on websites are most probably due to JavaScript. JavaScript Applications Performance Monitoring helps to prevent these unnecessary outages and errors.

Main Benefits of JavaScript Performance Monitoring:

• Frontend APM tools help to reduce latency, which is key for driving up the number of conversions
• End-to-end observability into the frontend and its dependencies help to spot underlying performance issues across the entire stack

Relying solely on web browser profiling tools is not a viable option. The market is full of frontend monitoring solutions ranging from lightweight and open-source all the way to SaaS Enterprise-ready Tools. Let's take a look at some of the best of them available in 2023.

1. Better Stack

Better Stack is a structured log management platform based on ClickHouse. Better Stack collects real-time JavaScript performance data from both Node.js backend and frontend, and supports integrations with multiple existing frameworks and logging solutions such as Koa, Winston, Bunyan, and Typescript. Better Stack's advanced built-in collaboration features, resource-efficient ClickHouse, and visually pleasing, dark-mode UI help you to spend less time debugging and focus on shipping higher-quality software faster.

Better Stack Logs is a part of the Better Stack ecosystem, and together with Better Stack Uptime, they create a complete observability solution with incident management built-in. With one-click Better Uptime integration, you can easily alert on-call team members of any irregularities in your application's behavior. Be it a specific log message error or a predefined usage trend.

2. SigNoz

SigNoz is an MIT-licensed, open-source alternative to many APM tools. It's a full-stack observability tool allowing you to monitor metrics and traces, with Log management on the way.

SigNoz supports OpenTelemetry for instrumentation and offers out-of-the-box charts and visualizations. It runs on either Kafka+Druid or OLAP database ClickHouse for the backend. The Query service is built-in GO, and the frontend is Typescript-powered.

3. LogRocket

LogRocket offers a complex frontend monitoring and product analysis platform, allowing you to replay sessions, evaluate frontend performance impact, analyze end-user experience track errors and evaluate metrics critical for conversions.

LogRocket analyses the impact of UX issues, allows you to see user journeys, and also allows for alerting and integration with third-party tools.

4. Sentry.io

Sentry offers APM for JavaScript applications and a variety of frameworks such as React, Angular, Ember, Vue, Next.js, and Electron. Sentry allows you to monitor and identify issues with applications performance, observe and obtain end-to-end tracing and see the root cause of performance issues. Sentry's APM allows for the collection of complete stack traces, or you can simulate the error environment.

5. Dynatrace

Dynatrace's all-in-one monitoring solution also offers an APM tool for automated observability for cloud-native services. It offers automated discovery and mapping, end-to-end observability, multiplatform app monitoring, and root-cause and impacts analysis.

It's a feature-packed, enterprise-ready monitoring solution, which often makes it quite pricey and painful to start with.

6. AppSignal

AppSignal is a tool that provides an overview of your performance for the frontend and backend, has host monitoring and error tracking, and allows you to collect metrics from your application. Use easy-to-customize dashboards to track load size, database queries, revenue, and more.

It has an anomaly analysis system with some precautionary warnings that trigger when things are not working as they are supposed to. The biggest disadvantage is that it lacks fundamental logging and monitoring features.

7. Splunk

Splunk's APM offers an application performance monitoring and troubleshooting solution for cloud-native microservice-based apps. It promises full-fidelity, 100% tracing, and an AI root cause analysis, anomaly detection, and discovery and mapping.

Since Splunk belongs among the founding members and active contributors to OpenTelemetry, Splunk APM supports open, vendor-neutral instrumentation, allowing for even more flexibility.

8. AppOptics

Solarwinds offers multiple operation-specific APM tools, such as SAM or AppOptics. AppOptics offers on-prem, hybrid, and cloud-based, distributed applications monitoring. It allows you to combine dashboards to visualize metrics from application and infrastructure in one place and eventually offers consolidated Monitoring for all server, host, containers, and serverless environments.

SolarWinds' AppOptics offers an Application Performance Monitoring for Java, .Net, Python, PHP, Scala, Node.js, Ruby, and Golang applications.

9. New Relic

New Relic offers a pre-configured observability solution for JavaScript monitoring, including monitors for Apdex and CPU utilization, and visualizes these metrics in informative dashboards, including also the slowest transactions or throughput. New Relic covers offers Service Maps, Error Analytics, code-level analysis, and real-time insights.

10. Bugsnag

Bugsnag allows you to monitor and debug Javascript applications. It automatically detects script errors and offers cross-browser Monitoring and error grouping. It also supports JavaScript frameworks - React, Vue, and Angular with error reporting libraries, which hooks into frameworks' error handlers and reports specific data.

Bugsnag also offers multi-dimensional filtering capacities for browser, OS, user, and other filters. It also supports version benchmarking, automatic diagnostics, stack tracing and source mapping, and breadcrumb collection. Bugsnag offers both SaaS and Self-hosted deployment variants.

11. Raygun

Raygun allows you to monitor JavaScript web applications' performance and errors and collects data for deeper diagnostic and performance analysis.

Raygun provides you with real-time application performance-related issues for both web and mobile applications. It also collects metrics about customer experience, monitors errors and crashes, and provides code-level insights on any outages. You can deploy Raygun alongside RUM and Crash reporting to obtain a full-observability, client-focused monitoring solution.

12. Instana

Instana's an IBM solution for Monitoring. Its APM allows you to optimize performance using automatically contextualized observability data. It automatically discovers, maps, and monitors dependencies across the infrastructure.

Instana leverages automation for fast incident resolution and performance monitoring. It also allows for software version impact assessment and Monitoring.

Conclusion

JavaScript is one of the most popular and widely-used languages in the world, which also allows for the creation of countless client-side libraries and frameworks. New web applications are deployed all the time, so the chances of a breakthrough come down to speed and reliability. APM tools reduce the number of performance-related issues and prevent them from escalating to an outage. Knowing all this, there is no reason to neglect JavaScript monitoring, especially in 2023. For further resources on APM head over to our list of the best application performance monitoring tools.