Foundations of a Frontend Platform - Observability & Monitoring

One of the great challenges of Frontend Development is not knowing anything about the runtime environment your code will eventually be executed in. In your Standardized Logging, you'll likely want to automatically add data about the user's environment to better analyse the cause of logged errors. Besides this, it also allows you to make data-driven decisions on what Browser functionality you should support.

Monitoring Application health is another thing where a Client-side application differs greatly from a server-side application. You can't monitor the CPU and memory usage, or the number of concurrent connections. Or, sure you can monitor this for your Webserver, but monitoring this for all clients that run your Frontend application is not desirable nor particularly helpful.

This requires a different way of looking at observability. Logging, Monitoring and Alerting is something that typical Platform Engineers that work on Server and Infrastructure Platform, think of in an entirely different way. 

If you're a SaaS company, or a bank, or an insurance company, and you have a regulatory or contractual requirement of a certain availability percentage, how do you detect your authenticated, secure environment actually provides a user interface that is available and functional, instead of a white screen because of some uncaught Javascript exception?

A Frontend Platform will offer the right level of observability for Frontend applications. Not depending on how each product team has implemented it, but available to everyone in a standardized way.