Documentation Grafana Cloud Observe and act Monitor applications Frontend Observability Session replay Quickstart

Session Replay quickstart

Get your first session recording flowing from your application to Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability.

Before you begin

To use Session Replay, you need:

• A Grafana Cloud account.
• An application already instrumented with the Faro Web SDK, version 2.8.2 or later. If you haven’t set this up yet, complete the Frontend Observability quickstart first.
• npm installed on your machine.

Step 1: Enable Session Replay for your stack

Session Replay is disabled by default and must be enabled per Grafana Cloud stack.

1. Open a Grafana Support ticket requesting Session Replay be enabled.
2. List the Grafana Cloud stacks you’d like to enable it on.

Step 2: Install the Faro Instrumentation Replay package

From your application folder, run:

Bash Copy

npm install @grafana/faro-instrumentation-replay

Step 3: Add ReplayInstrumentation to Faro

In your Faro initialization code, import ReplayInstrumentation and add it to the instrumentations array:

js Copy

import { getWebInstrumentations, initializeFaro } from '@grafana/faro-web-sdk';
import { ReplayInstrumentation } from '@grafana/faro-instrumentation-replay';

initializeFaro({
  url: 'http://faro-collector-us-central-0.grafana.net/collect/{app-key}',
  app: {
    name: 'my-app',
    version: '1.0.0',
  },
  instrumentations: [...getWebInstrumentations(), new ReplayInstrumentation()],
});

With default settings, all input values and text content are masked client-side before anything leaves the browser. You can tune masking, sampling, and other options later. Refer to Instrument Session Replay.

Step 4: Deploy and generate a session

1. Deploy your application with the updated Faro configuration.
2. Open the application in a browser.
3. Navigate through a few pages, click around, and interact with the app for at least a few seconds.

Step 5: View your recording

1. In Grafana Cloud, go to Frontend Observability.
2. Select your application.
3. Open the Sessions tab.
4. Find your session in the list and open it to watch the recording.

After a session is recorded, it can take up to five minutes for the recording to appear. For ongoing sessions, new portions of the recording also appear in intervals of up to five minutes. You can’t watch a live session in real time.

Next steps

• Review Data privacy in Session Replay to make sure your setup meets your compliance requirements before recording production traffic.
• Configure masking, sampling, and other options to match your application’s needs.
• Learn how Session Replay works.
• If your recording doesn’t appear or looks corrupted, refer to Troubleshoot.