Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

A recent survey revealed that developers and engineering teams waste 8+ hours a week on inefficiencies in their role. Poor reporting tools are a main contributor, with Jira being regarded as a frequent source of friction. But since Jira is so deeply embedded in most organizations' infrastructure and processes, replacing it is not really an option. Rather, the solution lies in optimizing how users interact with it rather than abandoning it altogether.

One of the biggest challenges in frontend development is identifying when and why users encounter performance issues, whether it’s slow page loads, JavaScript errors, or failed HTTP requests. With Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability — a hosted service for real user monitoring (RUM) — you get immediate, clear, and actionable insights into the end-user experience of your web applications.

Jira is an industry favorite when it comes to managing software projects, yet its native dashboards can sometimes leave teams wanting more insight. The default views give a general update, but often lack the connection to the day-to-day activity happening in other parts of your workflow. As organizations use a wide mix of modern tools – from code repositories and cloud services to spreadsheets and reporting apps, it’s easy for critical details to get scattered or overlooked.

Note: A version of this post originally appeared on the OpenTelemetry blog. Victoria Nduka is user experience designer and open source contributor making her way into the cloud native space. She writes about design, accessibility, and open source with the same curiosity she brings to her work. On May 29, I wrapped up my mentorship with Prometheus through the Linux Foundation mentorship program.

Imagine you’re a frontend engineer monitoring the user experience for an e-commerce app. You notice your checkout flow has a 15% abandonment rate. Your API responses are inconsistent. Your users are frustrated, and you’re drowning in data and complex queries trying to figure out why. Sound familiar? You can use real user monitoring (RUM) to determine what has happened, looking at page load times, error counts, user sessions, etc.

In the early stages of building a system, a few well-placed dashboards and monitors can provide sufficient visibility into service health and performance. However, as infrastructure scales and teams grow, so does the complexity of the monitoring landscape. In organizations where individual teams manage their own services but rely on a central platform or observability team for tooling and guidance, this complexity can quickly multiply.