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Section 6 · Observe with turnkey solutions

Real user monitoring and browser-to-backend trace correlation.

Estimated time: 2 min

What real users experience

Frontend Observability captures performance data from actual browser sessions. You instrument your frontend once, using an open source SDK that emits standard OTel signals.

  • See what your users actually experience: real browser sessions, Core Web Vitals, and performance data from actual user traffic, not synthetic proxies.
  • Find and fix frontend errors fast: triage errors with automatic grouping, detailed stack traces, and actionable guidance.
  • Trace problems from browser to backend: connect a user’s frontend session to the exact backend service call that caused the issue, with full distributed tracing context.
  • Analyze frontend data in the workflow you already use: query and visualize frontend performance alongside your application insights, logs, and traces in Grafana dashboards.
Frontend to backend trace flow showing browser interaction through to database
Try it out in Grafana Play

What keeps you up at night

Role / WorriesWhat you get with the app
Developer
  • Users report checkout is slow or a page hangs, but backend metrics look fine and it doesn’t happen in staging
  • Can’t reproduce it, can’t explain it
  • Real user sessions broken down by page, browser, device, and geography, so you can isolate where it’s happening and who is affected
  • Tie performance data to deployment markers to catch regressions before users find them
SRE, On-Call Engineer
  • During an incident, the frontend team blames the backend and the backend team’s dashboards look clean
  • Hours spent debating ownership instead of fixing the problem
  • Distributed tracing connects the browser session to the exact backend span. Both teams see the same evidence.
  • No more finger-pointing across separate dashboards and different data
Frontend, Web Engineer
  • Error reports arrive as support tickets and screenshots
  • No fast path from “a user saw this” to “here’s what broke and why”
  • Errors are automatically grouped and prioritized by user impact
  • Detailed stack traces give you a direct path from symptom to root cause
Engineering Manager, VP Engineering
  • Paying for a standalone RUM tool, a separate APM, and a separate logging platform
  • Engineers still have to manually stitch them together during incidents
  • Browser telemetry in the same Grafana Cloud instance you already use. One fewer vendor, one fewer login.
  • Frontend performance alongside your logs, traces, and application data. No manual correlation.