Practical Frontend Observability for Production Teams

Frontend observability is not about collecting every event. It is about making incident diagnosis fast enough that customers do not feel the blast radius.

Build around three signals

1. Errors: runtime exceptions, failed API calls, and hydration failures.
2. Performance: route-level web vitals and long tasks.
3. Release context: commit SHA, feature flags, and deployment region.

When these are correlated, incident triage is dramatically faster.

Capture release metadata on every event

Attach release data to each telemetry payload:

type TelemetryContext = {
  release: string;
  environment: 'production' | 'staging';
  route: string;
  flags: string[];
};

Without release context, alerts tell you something broke but not why.

Define alert thresholds with product context

A 1% error rate might be fine for a low-traffic internal route and catastrophic for checkout.

Create SLO-aware thresholds per domain:

• auth
• payments
• search
• content

Callout: Alert fatigue usually means thresholds were copied, not designed.

Start with a minimum dashboard

Your first dashboard should answer:

• Which releases introduced regression?
• Which route has the highest failure impact?
• Is the issue global or region-specific?

If your dashboard cannot answer these, reduce scope and redesign.