This is better than nothing but not having monitoring for the frontend will cost you dearly in the long run.

When you are missing monitoring on the frontend you are completely blind there. Sooner or later you will experience the hassle of the standard user feedback loop.

Missing information when clients complain and wasted time & effort gathering information.

When clients don’t complain, problems usually fly under the radar.

These issues result in a lot of wasted time and effort, not only for you but for your clients as well. When you are not proactive and fast at solving problems your image is affected. Sometimes this is the first impression users have of you and it can stop them from becoming clients.

Solution

Let’s say the priority for your business is the backend and you can’t commit a lot of resources for monitoring the frontend. That is completely fine. You can just choose a monitoring solution that is easy to setup, cheap or free if you are just getting started. I usually go with Sentry. It is a real-time event logging and aggregation platform that can fix all the above issues for less than 10 minutes of setup. Sentry can also be used for the backend but we are focusing on the frontend here. If you don’t know what to choose go with Sentry, the setup effort is so low you have nothing to lose.

That’s it!

Really?

Yup!

With time you’ll fine tune Sentry to better adapt to your circumstances, but you are now a lot better off than when you started. Frontend monitoring is one of those things that even if you are doing it wrong you still get a lot of benefits out of it (similar to usability tests, go do those too after you’re done here 1).

Be sure to take a look at tips and tricks to fine tune your Sentry setup.

Happy monitoring.