What should I use for observability across frontend, backend, and infra?

A good observability stack usually has three layers:

1. Frontend: capture user experience, JS errors, page performance
2. Backend: traces, logs, metrics, errors
3. Infra: host/container/Kubernetes metrics, logs, alerts

Best default recommendation

If you want one practical, widely used setup:

• OpenTelemetry for instrumentation and trace collection
• Prometheus + Grafana for metrics and dashboards
• Loki for logs
• Tempo or Jaeger for traces
• Sentry for frontend and backend error tracking

That gives you:

• metrics: “Is the system healthy?”
• logs: “What happened?”
• traces: “Where is latency coming from?”
• errors: “What broke for users?”

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If you want a simpler, mostly managed stack

If you don’t want to operate the observability tooling yourself:

• Datadog: strongest all-in-one option
• New Relic: good all-in-one alternative
• Grafana Cloud: good balance of managed + open source
• Honeycomb: excellent for tracing/debugging distributed systems
• Sentry: best for app errors and frontend issues

A common managed combo is:

• Datadog for infra + APM + logs
• Sentry for frontend/backend errors

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What to use by layer

Frontend

Use:

• Sentry for JS errors, session replay, release health
• OpenTelemetry or vendor SDK for frontend tracing
• Real User Monitoring (RUM) if available

Track:

• page load time
• Core Web Vitals
• JS exceptions
• API latency from the browser
• user sessions and crashes

Backend

Use:

• OpenTelemetry SDKs
• tracing with context propagation
• structured logs
• metrics via Prometheus/OpenTelemetry

Track:

• request latency
• error rate
• throughput
• dependency latency
• DB query timings
• queue lag
• saturation signals

Infra

Use:

• Prometheus node exporters / kube-state-metrics / cAdvisor
• Grafana
• Loki for centralized logs
• cloud-native monitoring if on AWS/GCP/Azure

Track:

• CPU/memory/disk/network
• pod/container restarts
• node pressure
• autoscaling behavior
• service availability
• ingress/load balancer errors

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Recommended architecture

If you’re starting from scratch:

• Instrument apps with OpenTelemetry
• Send:
  • traces to Tempo/Jaeger/Datadog/New Relic
  • metrics to Prometheus/Grafana Cloud/Datadog
  • logs to Loki/Elastic/Datadog
• Use Sentry for app errors and frontend monitoring
• Correlate everything with:
  • trace IDs
  • request IDs
  • user/session IDs where appropriate

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My practical recommendation by team size

Small team / startup

• Sentry
• Grafana Cloud or Datadog
• OpenTelemetry everywhere

Medium team

• OpenTelemetry
• Prometheus + Grafana + Loki + Tempo
• Sentry
• Add alerting with PagerDuty/Opsgenie

Enterprise

• Usually Datadog or Splunk Observability
• Still use OpenTelemetry to avoid vendor lock-in

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Rule of thumb

If you only choose one thing to standardize on:
Use OpenTelemetry as the instrumentation standard.

Then choose one vendor or stack for:

• metrics
• logs
• traces
• frontend error monitoring

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If you want, I can give you:

1. a best stack for AWS/GCP/Azure,
2. a budget-conscious open-source stack, or
3. a “minimal but solid” setup for a startup.