Splunk RUM Frontend Error Monitoring is Now Generally Available!

Debugging errors is an essential component to SRE and developer workflows. “How do we prioritize and isolate JavaScript errors more effectively?” is a top challenge we hear from engineering teams looking to improve end-user experience. Therefore, we are excited to announce the general availability of Splunk RUM frontend error monitoring. 

Frontend error monitoring helps SRE and development teams identify the most frequent JavaScript errors by message and type, and provides stack traces and user session data from every error to recreate the issue locally, connected with relevant traces from backend services. Along with RUM for Native Mobile Apps, Synthetic Monitoring, Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Infrastructure Monitoring, log management, and incident response capabilities, frontend error monitoring helps users extend Observability into debugging throughout the software development lifecycle.

Splunk RUM frontend error monitoring is available today. Here’s a brief walkthrough with some of its unique capabilities.

Prioritize and Isolate Errors with More Context:

As you view your overall client side performance in Spunk RUM’s summary screen, you’ll notice  Frontend Errors by ErrorID in the left side panel. This provides you with the top 10 errors by stack trace over a given time period, environment, and application. Here we’re examining the last 15 minutes, within all the applications in our pmrum-shop environment. We easily find error frequency, with additional context about error type and specific error messages being returned. 

Clicking into an error gives us additional context on total error count and how the error is trending, plus all stack traces collected each time this error has been thrown. Here we’ve selected ErrorID 8ee768f2; the error has an undefined function, and has occurred 134 times. 

Clicking anywhere in the error overview takes us to our Tag Spotlight feature, helping us understand common criteria of this error. ErrorID 8ee768f2 is occurs on several URLs across our user funnel, but only on Safari version 96.0.4664.45. We can also understand error frequency by country and region to scope the error’s geographical impact.

By clicking into Example Sessions we can view the entire transaction across the user session. Splunk RUM connects automatically with Splunk APM and throughout our Observability suite, so we have end-to-end visibility and context into where the frontend error occurs alongside relevant APM traces from backend services. 

By viewing the full transaction we can understand how errors impact customer experience and system performance . Here we see ErrorID 8ee768f2 in context of the entire transaction, alongside all trace data.

Error Aggregation within Splunk’s Observability Platform

Splunk RUM’s frontend error monitoring helps enhance the Splunk Observability suite by giving you additional context about frontend bugs and errors on top of end to end visibility into latency and speed. In every user session you can view both client side and backend calls. Unlike error debugging solutions that may provide all client side context, Splunk helps you understand the impact of backend services from frontend errors.

Try it today! Getting started with Splunk RUM is easy, and we support OpenTelemetry, so you won’t be locked in to any proprietary instrumentation. 

Try Splunk RUM today, or read the docs to enable the feature now.