How to instrument a React app for observability (traces, performance insights, debugging user flows), common pitfalls, and practical implementation tips.

How to instrument a React app for observability (traces, performance insights, debugging user flows), common pitfalls, and practical implementation tips.

Ops practices are often overlooked within the frontend community, yet they're a powerful tools that help to drastically increase a quality of your product, enhance a quality of life, potentially even decrease costs, and let alone make you more valuable engineer across the bigger organization. We'll spend 20 minutes learning following:
- What's observability and how is it different from monitoring?
- What to measure, and what not?
- How to?
After the talk you'll have an idea of what the subject matter is, and understanding where to dig next, should you find yourself interested.

Agentic React apps where UIs autonomously act, chain tool calls, and evolve state—bring complexity that traditional observability tools can't unravel. How do you actually understand what your agents are doing in production?

In this talk, we'll explore agent observability: capturing not just logs, metrics, and traces, but the reasoning, tool usage, and decision paths behind agent behavior. You'll learn how to bring visibility into agent workflows, how OpenTelemetry semantic conventions help standardize telemetry, and how modern tools let your agents "talk back," so you can debug, understand, and trust what they're doing.

By the end, you will take away a practical workflow to instrument, trace, and interrogate agents—so your apps aren't operating in the dark.