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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
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 to help you understand user behavior and identify product usability issues
6 product health monitoring tools to help you assess the technical performance of your product, such as loading speed, bugs, and errors
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 lets us see all the tiny details we don't track in Google Analytics and get a complete view of the Madgicx user experience.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
2. LogRocket
LogRocket is product analytics software that focuses on spotting front-end issues.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
💡 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.
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.
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.