Over the past few weeks, I’ve been diving deep into real-time performance monitoring for our platform. It started with analyzing Round Trip Time (RTT) — the total time for a request to leave the client, hit our servers, and return with a response. Monitoring RTT gave us the first insight into end-to-end latency, helping us identify whether delays came from the client, network, or backend.
Next, we built a custom query to track Timeout and Cancelled Transactions. The idea was simple: some transactions never finish properly, and without surfacing this metric, they remain hidden behind average response times. By separating these failed interactions, we could measure how often users abandon requests or face slow services — a critical signal for reliability.
We didn’t stop there. Rendering Time became another key metric. Measuring frontend rendering duration helped us spot performance bottlenecks after the backend response arrives. It turns out, a fast API is not enough if the UI takes forever to paint meaningful content.
We also added visibility into Failed Resource Loads — things like missing scripts, broken images, or third-party calls silently failing in the background. Tracking these issues revealed UX problems that standard error metrics often miss.
On top of this, we experimented with custom dashboards, big number widgets for KPIs, threshold-based alerts in Sentry, and trend tables for historical analysis. Each feature brought a new layer of observability, from real-time incident detection to long-term optimization.
What I loved about this journey is how each metric unlocked a different perspective: latency, reliability, frontend performance, and user experience — all connected. The result is a monitoring setup that’s not just reactive but proactive and actionable.
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