Frontend monitoring

What is Grafana Faro?

A project for frontend application observability, Grafana Faro includes a highly configurable web SDK for real user monitoring (RUM) that instruments browser frontend applications to capture observability signals. The frontend telemetry can then be correlated with backend and infrastructure data for seamless, full-stack observability.

GitHub project

Blog announcement

Documentation

Grafana Faro overview

The Grafana Faro Web SDK is a highly configurable open source JavaScript agent that can easily be embedded in web applications to collect real user monitoring (RUM) data: performance metrics, logs, exceptions, events, and traces.

Faro was started at Grafana Labs and announced in 2022. The mission of the project is to help users monitor web application performance, discover frontend errors, and track user behavior to ease failure resolution. The collected frontend observability data can then be correlated with backend and infrastructure data in the Grafana Labs LGTM stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, Mimir for metrics) for a seamless, full-stack, open source observability solution.

Grafana Labs is proud to lead the development of the Grafana Faro project, building first-class support for Faro into Grafana, and ensuring Grafana Labs customers receive Faro support and frontend monitoring features as needed.

Introduction to Grafana Faro

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Why use Grafana Faro for frontend monitoring?

Leverage multiple automatic as well as manual instrumentation capabilities

Monitor web application performance by gathering web vitals metrics, providing insights into user-perceived performance, interactivity, and visual stability

Capture unhandled errors and rejected promises to help discover and troubleshoot errors within the original source code context

Track user activity, such as user sessions and key events as well as feature usage, user journeys, and KPIs

Collect frontend logs to gain additional context into errors, user activities, and the state of your application

Seamlessly integrate with the Grafana Labs LGTM stack (Loki-Grafana-Tempo-Mimir) for a full open source observability solution

Embed with just 2 lines of code and get started collecting performance metrics, logs, exceptions, events, and traces instantly

Capture frontend traces via OpenTelemetry-JS integration

How does Grafana Faro work for frontend monitoring?

Once the Grafana Faro Web SDK is integrated with your application, it collects the necessary data and submits it to a collector that you can run yourself or that runs in Grafana Cloud.

The collector receives the data from the Grafana Faro Web SDK and saves it into Grafana Loki and Grafana Tempo.

You can then use Grafana to visualize real user monitoring data.