LogDNA, a log management solution for DevOps teams, today extended its browser logging capability, which will give developers visibility into the front end and thus more easily debug web apps.

The new feature, called Browser Logger, is generally available within its platform with web app integration.

As more and more applications run on web clients on end-user devices and use complex software – such as scripts that are designed to retrieve from databases and shuffle data – there’s a great deal more that can go wrong on the client-side.

Many products and tools already exist for observability on the backend for server-based applications, but LogDNA says there’s a notable gap on the frontend. So the company developed its new front-end solution to bridge that gap in its own solution.

LogDNA’s new Browser Logger resolves this need by capturing errors and logs on the client and synchronizes them alongside server-side logs, thus allowing developers to understand log data from the browser to effectively debug client-side errors.

“Customers struggle to extend their observability stack into their frontend web applications to monitor for client-side errors and collect critical debugging information,” said Peter Cho, vice president of product at LogDNA. “This makes it difficult to identify when problems occur, and troubleshooting errors become difficult and time-consuming.”

Log management is a fundamental part of debugging in the maintenance of most application code and the discovery of most bugs. Although many can be found through testing – because that way they’re discovered before they reach the client and go live – sometimes they get into the wild. That’s because no test environment can ever accurately represent the real world and certainly can’t keep up with the strange variations of every browser version, operating system and device that exists.

With the ability to provide logs from the client-side, errors and stack-traces produced from apps can be correlated with specific application releases or browser versions. They can also log performance metrics in real time to help reveal how specific user interface functions affect user devices.

In this way, developers will have better insight as to how their apps are working in the field and improve their product with actual metrics. “LogDNA Browser Logger makes it quick and painless to find and fix issues that span between front-end and back-end applications so developers can spend less time debugging and more time on value-adding tasks,” said Cho.

Image: LogDNA