# Best Node.js Application Monitoring Tools in 2026
According to 2021
[Stack Overflow's survey](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021),
Node.js is the sixth most popular technology used by developers.
[Node.js Applications](https://betterstack.com/community/guides/scaling-nodejs/) Performance Management and Monitoring tools enable
code-level observability, faster recovery, troubleshooting, and easier
maintenance of Node.js applications.
The market is saturated with APM solutions, built either as an all-purpose SaaS
observability tool or purposely built for JavaScript platforms. Let's look at
some of the best of them in 2026.
## 1. [Better Stack](https://betterstack.com/)
Better Stack offers a structured [log management](https://betterstack.com/log-management) platform based on [ClickHouse](https://clickhouse.com), delivering **sub-second search across billions of Node.js log records** with native support for **Winston, Bunyan, Pino, Koa, and TypeScript**. It also includes [AI-native error tracking](https://betterstack.com/error-tracking) **built on the Sentry SDK protocol** — keep your existing instrumentation, point it at Better Stack, and get full stack traces, release-level error trends, and **1-click AI fix prompts for Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex** at roughly one-sixth the cost of Sentry. See how JavaScript logging and error collection works in practice:
The [Better Stack Collector](https://betterstack.com/tracing) instruments your Node.js services with **zero code changes** via eBPF-based auto-instrumentation, collecting logs, traces, and metrics directly from running processes. See how it sets up in minutes:
[Real user monitoring](https://betterstack.com/real-user-monitoring) connects the frontend to the backend: **session replay is linked directly to the errors and traces from that session**, so you can watch a recording and jump straight to the Node.js trace that explains what broke. **Core Web Vitals are tracked per URL with alerting**, and autocapture records every user action with retroactive event definition.
Better Stack brings all of this together with [distributed tracing](https://betterstack.com/tracing), [infrastructure monitoring](https://betterstack.com/infrastructure-monitoring), [uptime monitoring](https://betterstack.com/uptime), and **[incident management](https://betterstack.com/incident-management) built in**. The **[AI SRE](https://betterstack.com/ai-sre)** performs automated root cause analysis across your service map, logs, and traces, integrating with Claude Code and Cursor to help resolve issues faster.
## 2. [PM2](https://pm2.keymetrics.io/)
 PM2 is a popular daemon process manager for
Application Maintaining and Monitoring. PM2 is deployed via npm and allows for
monitoring any Node.js application via CLI. It can keep an eye on hardware, and
performance metrics, track bugs and exceptions and receive alerts in PM2
Monitoring Dashboard. PM2 also offers a Plus solution suitable for enterprises.
## 3. [Raygun](https://raygun.com/)
 Raygun offers an APM solution for Node.js
with installation packs for AWS and Heroku and a customs agent for other
environments.
Raygun provides 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.
Raygun also offers crash reporting, which helps to obtain a full-observability,
client-focused monitoring solution.
## 4. [Clinic.js](https://clinicjs.org/)
 Clinic.js uses multiple tools to
diagnose and remediate performance-related issues in any Node.js application.
The Doctor diagnoses performance issues and offers guidance when using
specialized tools to diagnose and resolve specific problems. Issues such as low
CPU usage, obstruction of garbage collection, frequent event delays, or a
chaotic number of active actions can indicate many potential problems. The
doctor tool will then suggest remediation using other Clinic.js tools.
## 5. [New Relic](https://newrelic.com/)
 New Relic offers a Node.js quickstart
for installing pre-configured observability solutions, including monitors for
Apdex and CPU utilization and visualizes these metrics in informative
dashboards, including also slowest transactions or throughput. New Relic also
offers Service Maps, Error Analytics, code-level analysis, and real-time
insights.
## 6. [Stackify Retrace](https://stackify.com/retrace/)
 Stackify's Retrace offers basic and also
advanced Application Performance Monitoring features, capable of collecting and
monitoring logs and tracking deployments. Retrace uses lightweight profiling to
automatically track key methods in code and fetches detailed performance data.
Retrace can track key performance issues such as slow dependencies, queries,
requests, and re-occurring errors.
Retrace offers automatic instrumentation for Express, AWS Services, Mongo DB,
K8s, Postgres, or AWS Lambda.
## 7. [Datadog](https://www.datadoghq.com/)
 Node.js integration for Datadog APM
collects and monitors Node.js logs, traces, and custom performance metrics.
Datadog uses hot-shots for instrumentation.
Datadog's APM offers end-to-end distributed tracing able to monitor applications
across browsers, platforms, and databases all the way to the lines of code. It
correlates frontend and backend data, which allows it to monitor service
dependencies and health metrics and troubleshoot performance-related issues.
## 8. Sematext
 Sematext offers APM support for most
modern languages and frameworks, including Node.js. Sematext can monitor
processes, threads and workers, memory, and garbage collection. Sematext also
supports integration for Express.js. On top of that, Sematext offers
complementary solutions such as logs management, alerting, correlation, and
more.
## 9. [Dynatrace](https://www.dynatrace.com/)
 Dynatrace offers an all-in-one
platform offering monitoring, security, analytics, and automation. Dynatrace's
APM offers automatic and intelligent observability for cloud-native environments
and enterprise apps. It enables end-to-end hybrid cloud tracing, service
performance optimization, and innovation.
Dynatrace monitors Node.js, enabling monitoring following Node.js metrics: Heap
and process metrics, heap dumps, CPU sampling, event loops, HTTP Calls, database
performance metrics, and OpenTelemetry traces.
## 10. [Prometheus](https://prometheus.io/) (and Grafana)
 Prometheus is an
open-source monitoring and alerting set of tools built by SoundCloud's engineers
in 2012. It was the second CNCF project after Kubernetes, and it has managed to
obtain a large and vibrant community of contributors and users ever since.
Grafana is a free, open-source software for data visualization. It is a powerful
and feature-rich tool for exploring, creating, and sharing dashboards across
teams. Connecting Prometheus and Grafana is not a must, but this tandem is often
adopted.
## 11. [Sentry.io](https://sentry.io/welcome/)
 Sentry offers a Node error and performance
monitoring tool capable of discovering and monitoring performance-related
issues, errors, and bottlenecks. It supports Node.js, Express, and KOA with SDKs
for instrumentation. Sentry identifies issues and observes the application with
end-to-end distributed tracing and performs an efficient root-cause analysis.
## 12. [AppOptics](https://www.appoptics.com/)
 AppOptics offers comprehensive
performance monitoring for both on-premises and highly distributed, cloud-based
applications. It combines dashboards to visualize metrics from applications and
infrastructure in one place and offers consolidated monitoring for all servers,
host, containers, and serverless environments.
## 13. [Bugsnag](https://www.bugsnag.com/)
 Bugsnag enables error reporting for
Node.js applications. It automatically captures both handled and unhandled
errors and helps to evaluate their impact.
It also enables basic alerting features via integrations with email, Slack, or
Pagerduty and data visualization using dashboards.
## Conclusion
Nowadays, APM is essential for delivering a reliable and successful, modern
application in a sustainable fashion. Many SaaS solutions offer automated
features for easier deployment and maintenance.
Most of the solutions offer a trial period ranging from 15 to 30 days, so you
can get your hands on multiple solutions before subscribing and find out which
works best with your stack.
Open-source tools, on the other hand, bring in a lot of freedom and
customizability. However, they often cause additional toil related to deployment
and maintenance and also unexpected infrastructure costs.