Monitoring backend signals has been standard practice for years, and tech companies have been alerting their SRE and software engineers when API endpoints are failing. But when you’re alerted about a backend issue, it’s often your end users who are directly affected. Shouldn’t we observe and alert on this user experience issues early on?

As frontend monitoring is a newer practice, companies often struggle to identify signals that can help them pinpoint user frustrations or performance problems.

At Datadog Summit London 2024, Maël Lilensten, product manager at Datadog, shared some of the signals we are using at Datadog to monitor our own frontend, how we manage alerting for our web and mobile engineers, and how focusing on user experience is helping us find backend issues faster.