Independent developer field guide
Edition 0012026
Category 07 / 12

Analytics & Monitoring

Traffic analytics, error tracking, and performance observability.

This layer tracks web traffic, user interactions, exception stack traces, and infrastructure health across production deployments. Before you pick a monitoring tool, decide whether you need high-level visitor metrics or deep event funnels and session replay. Lightweight tools like Plausible measure page views and referral sources without tracking cookies or capturing personal identifiable data, which avoids complex privacy consent banners. A frequent mistake is adding several heavy marketing trackers and performance agents to early landing pages. They inflate the client bundle, hurt Core Web Vitals, and add privacy regulation overhead before you have validated product market fit.

4 tools
Plausible Web analytics platform that tracks website traffic without cookies or collecting personal visitor dataAnalytics & Monitoringfree + paid self-hosted → PostHog Developer platform integrating product analytics, session recordings, feature management and experimentation toolsAnalytics & Monitoringfreemium → Sentry Application monitoring and developer observability platform that identifies, diagnoses and tracks software errors and performance regressionsAnalytics & Monitoringfreemium → Umami Open-source web analytics solution for website visitor tracking and custom event measurement without cookiesAnalytics & Monitoringfree + paid self-hosted ↗