# Frontend observability Frontend observability measures web application performance, errors, interactions, and telemetry in users' browsers, correlating frontend data with backend systems. This is one page of public article previews, not the complete archive. Follow Next page to continue. Summaries are not the original full articles. ## Digital Experience Monitoring with Grafana Cloud: Session Replay, synthetic checks, and faster investigations DevFeed: [Digital Experience Monitoring with Grafana Cloud: Session Replay, synthetic checks, and faster investigations]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Bukola Ayodele Published: 2026-09-15T01:35:30.954353Z Content type: article Language: en Sources: [Grafana Labs blog on Grafana Labs]() Topics: [digital experience monitoring](), [Grafana Cloud](), [Frontend observability](), [synthetic monitoring](), [real user monitoring](), [session replay](), [Instrumentation](), [web applications](), [JavaScript](), [Core Web Vitals](), [Traces]() Tags: [analytics](), [core-web-vitals](), [digital-experience-monitoring](), [frontend-observability](), [grafana](), [grafana-cloud](), [grafana-cloud-frontend-observability](), [instrumentation](), [javascript](), [logs](), [metrics](), [monitoring](), [observability](), [real-user-monitoring](), [session-replay](), [synthetic](), [synthetic-monitoring](), [traces](), [web-applications]() ### AI overview This article explains how Digital Experience Monitoring in Grafana Cloud combines Frontend Observability, Synthetic Monitoring, real user monitoring, and session replay. It shows how these capabilities help engineering teams detect issues proactively, understand their scope and root causes, correlate frontend signals with backend traces, and resolve production problems faster. ### Source excerpt When something breaks in production, the questions that matter most are also the toughest to answer from metrics alone: who was affected, what did they actually see, and is this worth waking someone up for? Answering those questions requires a fuller picture of the issue and its impact on your users. That's where Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) in Grafana Cloud comes in. By combining Frontend Observability and Synthetic Monitoring, DEM connects real user experiences with proactive testing, helping engineering teams understand the scope of an issue, investigate its cause, and resolve it faster, all within Grafana Cloud. In this blog post, we'll walk through some of the latest DEM updates in Grafana Cloud, and how to get started. You can also learn more by watching the video below. First, what is Digital Experience Monitoring? Digital Experience Monitoring in Grafana Cloud gives you a complete picture of how users experience your web applications, from real user data to proactive synthetic checks. DEM helps your team achieve: Real user visibility: know how users truly experience your web application, not just what your backend metrics suggest. Proactive detection: catch problems before your users do, using automated checks against your critical user journeys. End-to-end correlation: connect a frontend signal to the backend trace behind it. Faster resolution: cut your mean time to recovery from hours to minutes. Session Replay: see exactly what your users saw Session Replay in Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability lets you visually replay what a user saw and did inside your web application. Your team can watch exactly what users experienced and correlate it with real user monitoring signals like Core Web Vitals, user actions, and traces, which makes it a powerful tool for investigating bugs and running root cause analysis. Session Replay is powered by Faro, Grafana's open source JavaScript instrumentation library for collecting real user monitoring data. Let's walk ## From failed check to real user impact: Pairing Synthetic Monitoring and Frontend Observability in Grafana Cloud DevFeed: [From failed check to real user impact: Pairing Synthetic Monitoring and Frontend Observability in Grafana Cloud]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Mark Meier Published: 2026-09-12T11:22:06.456390Z Content type: tutorial Language: en Sources: [Grafana Labs blog on Grafana Labs]() Topics: [synthetic monitoring](), [Frontend observability](), [Grafana Cloud](), [observability]() Tags: [analytics](), [frontend-observability](), [grafana](), [grafana-cloud](), [logs](), [metrics](), [monitoring](), [observability](), [synthetic-monitoring](), [traces](), [uptime]() ### AI overview This article explains how to combine Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring with Frontend Observability to connect proactive checks with real-user impact. It describes the blind spots of synthetic-only monitoring and presents a combined workflow for faster triage, impact-aware alerts, and tests that evolve with real traffic. ### Source excerpt Say you get a support escalation about a page in the app that won't load. But when you pull up your synthetic checks, they're all green: 100% uptime, probes are passing. Something's not adding up, but which one do you trust? If you've run Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring, you've been on both sides of this. Sometimes it's the ticket: real users hit a wall on the path but your checks pass cleanly. Other times, it's the inverse: a check is failing, you're in a panic, and you start trying to reproduce things for 30 minutes--only to find it was a blip from a single region, with minimal impact to real users. Neither the green dashboard nor the red alert were lying, they just weren't answering the correct question. This ends up being the root problem. Synthetic Monitoring is exceptionally good at telling you if something broke. It can not, however, tell you who it happened to, how bad it was, or why it matters. This is not a flaw in Synthetic Monitoring; it's the boundary of what a controlled, scheduled test can know. Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability helps to close this gap. Synthetic Monitoring gives you a proactive, outside-in signal; Frontend Observability gives you the real-user, inside-out signal. Together they form a closed loop: synthetic alerts end up getting some real user context, and real user data can make your synthetic tests smart. In this post, we'll look at why a synthetic-only strategy can leave blind spots, what Frontend Observability adds, and walk through practical workflows for running them together in Grafana Cloud. Along the way, you'll learn that the payoff is concrete: faster triage, alerts that carry blast-radius context, and a check suite that evolves with real traffic instead of aging against it. Green checks don't mean happy users Synthetic Monitoring is an active signal. You script a journey or declare a target, run it on a schedule from known probe locations, and in return get clean consistent results. This precise control of variables i ## Visual playback of the user journey: Introducing Session Replay in Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability DevFeed: [Visual playback of the user journey: Introducing Session Replay in Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Lukasz Gut Published: 2026-09-12T11:22:06.456390Z Content type: article Language: en Sources: [Grafana Labs blog on Grafana Labs]() Topics: [session replay](), [Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability](), [Frontend observability](), [web applications](), [telemetry](), [SDKs]() Tags: [analytics](), [frontend-observability](), [grafana](), [grafana-cloud-frontend-observability](), [instrumentation](), [logs](), [metrics](), [monitoring](), [observability](), [privacy](), [session-replay](), [telemetry](), [traces](), [web-applications]() ### AI overview The article introduces Session Replay, a public-preview add-on for Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability. It visually reconstructs how a web application appeared and changed during a user session, linking that playback to session timelines and technical telemetry so engineering teams can investigate frontend problems more directly. ### Source excerpt Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability helps engineering teams quantify the end user experience by bringing metrics, logs, traces, and user session context to client-side web applications. Teams can monitor application health and performance over time, triage errors, and correlate frontend signals with backend telemetry to investigate issues across the stack. Yet some of the hardest frontend problems remain difficult to diagnose. A support ticket might report that a checkout button did nothing, a form unexpectedly reset, or a workflow broke only in one browser or on one device. Metrics can reveal a performance regression, logs can capture an error, and traces can expose a slow request, but no single signal shows what the interface actually looked like to the user. This is exactly why we built Session Replay, an add-on feature in Frontend Observability that provides a visual reconstruction of a user's journey, connected to the telemetry Grafana Cloud already collects. It helps engineering teams move from a reported problem to seeing what happened and knowing exactly where to investigate next. What is Session Replay in Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability? Session Replay, now in public preview, adds visual playback capabilities to Frontend Observability. It reconstructs how a web application appeared and changed as a user navigated and interacted with it, so you can observe the journey as it unfolded instead of inferring it from individual telemetry events. Frontend Observability already brings together a chronological timeline of the events within a user session. That timeline tells you what happened and when. Session Replay adds the missing visual context: what was happening in the interface around those events and how one interaction led to the next. Because both views belong to the same session, you can move between the user experience and the relevant technical signals without losing the thread of your investigation. Session Replay builds on the Grafana Faro Web SD