Best Node.js Application Monitoring Tools in 2024

According to 2021 Stack Overflow's survey, Node.js is the sixth most popular technology used by developers.

Node.js Applications 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 2023.

1. Better Stack

Better Stack offers a structured log management platform based on ClickHouse. It allows you to start collecting and monitoring data in real-time from both Node.js backend and frontend within minutes. Better Stack 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. PM2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 (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

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

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

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.