Digital Experience Monitoring with Grafana Cloud: Session Replay, synthetic checks, and faster investigations

Our sessions are populated and we can select one to replay. Private information is masked client-side, which means it is never sent to Grafana Cloud, but you can still clearly follow mouse movements and DOM actions. To view session recordings, you have two options: you can open a session directly from the session details page, or click the green button to open the player in a new tab. We recommend the second option, as it lets you watch the recording side-by-side with the full user journey that always stays synchronized with the player’s state.

The replay player gives you full control over playback:

• Playback controls: play, pause, and skip ten seconds forward or backward

• Adjustable speed: from 0.25x all the way up to 16x, which makes it easy to scan longer sessions

• Skip inactivity: jump past the quiet parts of the recording, so you stay focused on what matters

• Share button: copies a link to a specific moment in the replay, so you can send a teammate the exact second an issue happens

On the side, you can see the user journey with timestamps, showing what both the user and the browser were experiencing. You can also see errors from this view, skip straight to them, and filter and sort by errors.

This is where Session Replay gets really powerful. Because replays are correlated with your existing Faro telemetry, you can jump from a frontend error in your dashboard directly into the replay for that session, watch exactly what the user was doing when the error occurred, and then dig even further into the correlated traces.

To learn more about Session Replay in Frontend Observability, please check out this blog post and our technical docs. 

Synthetic Monitoring and Frontend Observability: better together

Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring runs automated checks against your critical user journeys, so you catch issues before your real users ever see them, while Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability captures what your real users are actually experiencing, turning your frontend performance into something you can measure and act on. Together, they form the foundation of Digital Experience Monitoring in Grafana Cloud, giving you both a proactive and real-world view of your users’ digital experience. 

We recently made it easier to move between Synthetic Monitoring and Frontend Observability when investigating an issue, enabling end-to-end correlation from a synthetic check through the frontend experience and into the traces behind it. 

Every time a Synthetic Monitoring browser check runs, it passively creates a matching Frontend Observability session, and that session is a fully controlled, repeatable run of a real user journey. From inside a check, you can now pull up Frontend Observability data right there as context and jump straight into the exact session that run created. Once you’re in that session, you have access to the session replay, the user journey, and traces.