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12 best product monitoring tools for cross-functional product teams

To continuously improve your product and deliver an excellent user experience, you need reliable data about your product's performance and your customers' interactions with it. 

Product monitoring tools give you insights to uncover the strengths and weaknesses of your product, and help prioritize initiatives for further optimization efforts.

Last updated

12 Oct 2022

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4 min

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We talked to a handful of product experts to develop this list of product monitoring tools and software that will help you understand your product's weaknesses, spot user issues, and build better products for your customers. 

Keep reading to learn more about the benefits and complexities of the product monitoring process, the best product monitoring tools for your team, and the metrics you should keep an eye on to improve the product experience.

Monitor your product usage with Hotjar

Hotjar helps you understand how users interact with your product so you can spot issues and identify opportunities to improve UX.

What you need to know about product monitoring

Product monitoring is the process of tracking your product performance, from technical parameters to user behaviors that uncover critical information about the product's usability.  

The data you collect from product monitoring helps you assess your development efforts, detect technical issues, and understand the user journey. With these insights, you can optimize the product experience (PX) and achieve customer delight

The product monitoring tools that follow are split into two groups based on their primary function:

6 product usage monitoring tools

Product usage monitoring tools help you understand how users navigate and interact with your product so you can spot usability issues and prioritize initiatives that will improve the product and user experience.

1. Hotjar

Hotjar (yours truly!) is a freemium product experience insights platform that lets you Observe how users experience your product, and Ask them how you can improve it. 

Hotjar’s Heatmaps and Session Recordings reveal how users navigate and interact with your product—see where they click, what catches their attention, and where they get stuck.

When you need to go beyond quantitative data, Hotjar’s Surveys and Feedback help you collect in-the-moment product feedback with voice-of-the-customer (VoC) context. Use these insights to learn what your customers love (or hate) about your site, and validate your product development plans.

Digital product teams love Hotjar because it’s set up for effective cross-functional collaboration and sharing.

#The Hotjar Dashboard makes it easy for teams to access quantitative and qualitative data in one place
The Hotjar Dashboard makes it easy for teams to access quantitative and qualitative data in one place

We use Hotjar to track user behavior. We combine it with Google Analytics to take the best of both worlds. With Google Analytics, we get detailed statistics, and Hotjar provides heatmaps and video recordings that let us see exactly what visitors do on the site, which is gold for the marketing and product teams.

Simon Kaguramamba
Product Lead, HEIApply

2. Amplitude Analytics

Amplitude Analytics is a product monitoring platform that gives product teams the audience insights they need to build customer-first products. It captures behavioral data—like user paths and in-app events—so you can better understand the user journey, measure customer engagement, and forecast behavior patterns over time.

#Anomalous performance detection with Amplitude Analytics
Anomalous performance detection with Amplitude Analytics

I prefer using Amplitude’s platform—it offers a ton of features that can be customized, and, best of all, provides stellar analytics and insight on user behavior. It admittedly falls a little short on its integration capabilities, but the overall experience makes it worth it.

Coralee Bechteler
Business And Tech Specialist, Step By Step Business

3. FullStory

FullStory is digital experience analytics software that collects quantitative and qualitative data to provide digital teams with a 360-degree overview of their users’ product experience.

#FullStory’s product performance dashboard
FullStory’s product performance dashboard

FullStory lets us see all the tiny details we don't track in Google Analytics and get a complete view of the Madgicx user experience.

Alexey Bondarenko
CTO, Madgicx

4. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a mobile app and website monitoring tool. It answers important questions about how your product is used, returning and churning customers, and where people get stuck.

#The Mixpanel dashboard displaying user paths
The Mixpanel dashboard displaying user paths

[Mixpanel] allows us to understand how users onboard in general, adopt certain features in particular, at what stage there are drop-offs, and where to make changes to ensure that everything works. Where Mixpanel comes especially helpful—it shows what activities users are doing before taking the target action.

Mike Yudin
Head of Product, Pushwoosh

5. UXCam

UXCam is a dedicated mobile app experience analytics tool. The combination of user behavior analytics and product health monitoring makes it a good choice for cross-functional mobile app teams.

#The statistics on UI freezes detected by UXCam
The statistics on UI freezes detected by UXCam

6. Smartlook

Smartlook is a user behavior analytics platform for web and mobile products. The tool tracks user behavior across several channels at once, allowing digital teams to build multi-platform funnels.

#Session recordings captured by Smartlook
Session recordings captured by Smartlook

6 product health monitoring tools

A slow loading speed, unresponsive servers, back-end and front-end errors—these are only a few examples of what can go wrong with your product without warning. Product health monitoring tools track product performance issues so you can resolve them before they result in customer churn.

1. Sentry

Sentry is a product monitoring platform popular among product teams, and for good reason—the platform is compatible with almost every framework and language.

#Sentry’s Alerts dashboard
Sentry’s Alerts dashboard

Our primary [product health monitoring tool] is Sentry, which is a solid tool. It’s affordable, the UX is enjoyable, and it does the job well. I wish it would be clearer which problems had an impact on the users, but their stack trace does a good enough job at helping to troubleshoot. Not to mention the plenty of integrations with most of our tech stack, which makes things that much more convenient.

Michał Suski
Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer, Surfer

2. LogRocket

LogRocket is product analytics software that focuses on spotting front-end issues.

#The session statistics by LogRocket
The session statistics by LogRocket

3. Bugsnag

Bugsnag is error monitoring and reporting software. If you struggle to assess your product health and prioritize tasks for your software team, Bugsnag helps by monitoring application stability in real time, and uses a stability score to automatically prioritize bugs.

#The Stability dashboard by Bugsnag
The Stability dashboard by Bugsnag

Bugsnag is a great tool to track bugs and solve crashes. The platform allows you to see the line of code that crashed your application, and it's all available in an easy-to-use dashboard. The search feature will enable you to search by a recent release or a specific area of ownership, so you can quickly solve the issue and get back to coding for your next release.

David Watkins
Director of Product Management, EthOS

4. Grafana

Grafana is an open-source analytics solution compatible with virtually every database. It’s a sophisticated solution that doesn't work out of the box: connect it to your data storage and define which data you want to see, and Grafana will query and visualize it to give you full control over your product architecture.

#Data visualization dashboard by Grafana
Data visualization dashboard by Grafana

We use Grafana for back-end and front-end performance monitoring. Our product has an SLO (service-level objective) approach where each service has its own indicators that need to be matched. We set up alerts for each service, and we are able to react immediately to any delays or difficulties in the service to increase the product's reliability.

Mike Yudin
Head of Product, Pushwoosh

5. Datadog

Datadog is a multi-functional application performance monitoring platform. Similar to LogRocket, it monitors both user-level data and technical product performance, like front-end and back-end data.

#Datadog’s Error Tracking dashboard
Datadog’s Error Tracking dashboard

💡 Pro tip: you can instantly visualize Datadog data in Grafana. If you use Datadog as a data source, you can pull data from there and build dynamic dashboards in Grafana. This integration is helpful when you want to blend data from multiple data sources.

6. CloudWatch

CloudWatch is an application and infrastructure monitoring solution for services running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and on-premises.

#Product performance visualization in CloudWatch
Product performance visualization in CloudWatch

CloudWatch helps us log each event that happens on a client’s workspace, and more importantly, use advanced search to find those logs afterwards. So, if a user experiences a problem, we can check the error message itself and everything that happened up to that point.

Deian Isac
Head of Agency Success, SPP.co

Choose the right product monitoring software

Different product monitoring tools track and analyze different metrics and behaviors. To stay on top of your product's performance, you’ll need to combine a few solutions. 

We suggest you choose at least one product usage monitoring platform and product health monitoring tool from our list, so you’re always aware of what users do inside your product, where they face roadblocks, and how you can improve the user experience for them.

Monitor your product usage with Hotjar

Hotjar helps you understand how users interact with your product so you can spot issues and identify opportunities to improve UX.

FAQs about product monitoring tools