Launching Vitality

Stephen van Beek image

Stephen van Beek

apm web vitals performance web monitoring

Introduction

Hey there! We're stoked to introduce you to Vitality, our awesome web vitals monitoring platform designed to optimize your users' experience on your website. Just add a single line of JavaScript, and you'll get a close-up view of your web app's performance from your users' perspective.

Hilary and I are a two-person team that's been working on Vitality as a side project for a little while now and after using it on our projects we're excited to launch as a generally available product.

Why build another monitoring tool?

The first question any friends, family or passers-by ask us when we tell them about Vitality is "why build another monitoring tools? Haven't you heard of DataDog?"

We have! We really like tools like DataDog, New Relic, Prometheus, etc. They're all great tools that have their place. But our experience has been that they're not always the best fit for small teams or side projects. They're often completely overkill both in the featureset they provide and the price they charge.

Vitality gives you minute-by-minute metrics for your web app's core web vitals, including Lighthouse metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). These real-time insights are from the perspective of your user's browser.

You'll see whether your internal dashboard is suffering because of a ropey internal DNS server, whether your page spends seconds furiously rendering with the JS library de jure, or whether your typical user is on a slow connection.

Who's it for?

Solo founders, tinkerers, small teams, agencies with multiple sites, or anyone who wants to know how their site is performing for their users without having to invest in a full-blown monitoring solution.

How do I get started?

Sign up for a 30-day free trial, add a site then add a single line of JS to your site. That's it! You'll start seeing data immediately. We don't do any batch processing so everything is in real-time.

What's next?

We have a bunch of features in the works that we're testing internally before releasing. Our roadmap includes:

  • showing the performance of resources that your page loads - like how many resources are loaded for a navigation, how large those resources are, and how long it takes to load them
  • meaningful filtering - we don't pre-aggregate anything when recording data. We're intending to progressively add filters and aggregations to help you find the data you're looking for
  • tracking deployments - we want to be able to help you to compare performance between two deployments easily.
  • alerts - we don't want to be the only ones who know when your site is slow. We want to help you to fix it before your users notice.

That's it for now. Until next time. 👋