Optimize application performance at the network layer: introducing HTTP Performance Insights in Frontend Observability

Imagine you’re a frontend engineer monitoring the user experience for an e-commerce app. You notice your checkout flow has a 15% abandonment rate. Your API responses are inconsistent. Your users are frustrated, and you’re drowning in data and complex queries trying to figure out why. Sound familiar? 

You can use real user monitoring (RUM) to determine what has happened, looking at page load times, error counts, user sessions, etc. But when performance issues strike, you also need to know why they happened and where to focus your optimization efforts. 

This is exactly where HTTP Performance Insights, a new feature in Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability, comes in. With HTTP Performance Insights, you can go beyond basic metrics with aggregated views that surface actionable signals, so you can quickly identify and resolve application performance issues at the network layer.

Here, we’ll explore the key features of HTTP Performance Insights, and offer an early look at the broader performance intelligence platform we’re building out in Frontend Observability. 

HTTP Performance Insights: clear, actionable data to drive results 

HTTP Performance Insights offers a comprehensive view into your application’s HTTP requests, allowing you to monitor request quality and detect bottlenecks in real time. Instead of reactive firefighting, teams can use HTTP Performance Insights to proactively identify performance issues and address them before they impact the user experience. 

Performance dashboards that highlight the network layer

The HTTP Performance Insights interface shows not just raw numbers, but health indicators, color-coding, and other trend analysis features to guide your attention to what matters most. 

To start your investigation, navigate to the HTTP tab in Frontend Observability. You can use the metrics across the top of the dashboard — including total requests, error totals, and error rate — to evaluate backend responsiveness, and protectively identify and address issues affecting frontend performance. You can also reference time to first byte and transfer size to identify further opportunities for optimization. 

The actionable breakdowns below those top-level metrics help you identify your biggest problems first. Sortable tables pinpoint your slowest endpoints, largest requests, and most error-prone calls. With this data, you can quickly answer questions like:

• Are image assets causing performance bottlenecks?
• Is a specific API endpoint generating most user errors?
• Which domains are consuming the most bandwidth?

The time series visualization lets you track trends and quickly correlate issues with potential causes. You can also look for clusters of errors to correlate issues against deployments, traffic spikes, or external dependencies.  

Deep dives into problematic endpoints 

When you identify a problematic endpoint with a high error rate, you can drill down for granular analysis. The single endpoint view provides request-level granularity, showing individual requests, their performance characteristics, and timing breakdowns.

This level of detail enables precise troubleshooting. You can see exactly which requests are outliers, understand request size patterns, and correlate performance with specific user sessions or geographic regions. The same rich visualization suite applies at this focused level, giving you consistent analytical capabilities whether you’re looking at the big picture or investigating a specific issue.

Get started with HTTP Performance Insights

HTTP Performance Insights is available now in public preview. You can access it in Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability by navigating to the HTTP tab. The feature automatically analyzes your existing HTTP request data, so there’s no additional instrumentation required.

We recommend first exploring the HTTP overview to identify performance patterns and problematic endpoints. Then, you can use the drill-down capabilities to investigate specific issues and correlate them with user impact.

What’s next

HTTP Performance Insights represents our first step towards building out a broader set of performance intelligence capabilities within Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability. We’re currently working to add the following features, which will also offer actionable views to help you correlate performance metrics to the user experience:

• Page Performance Insights: Comprehensive analysis of loading, rendering, and Web Vitals with resource utilization breakdowns
• Resource Loading Intelligence: Deep visibility into static assets, their impact on performance, and optimization opportunities
• Integrated User Experience Views: Timeline-based analysis showing how performance issues affect real user journeys

We are building with user needs in mind — so we welcome your feedback! 

To learn more about HTTP Performance Insights, please visit our docs.

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