Monitor JavaScript exceptions with Embrace

A key feature of Embrace Web RUM is JavaScript exception monitoring. 

JavaScript errors are a leading cause of user frustration and abandonment, especially on complex, dynamic web apps. Without a way to reliably capture and diagnose them in production, you’re essentially flying blind.

JavaScript exceptions are runtime errors that occur when the browser tries to execute broken or invalid code. These can result from bugs in your own application code, third-party scripts, or edge cases in user interactions or environments.

When an exception occurs, it can cause everything from small glitches (like a broken button or unresponsive element) to serious failures (like full-page crashes or infinite loading states). 

Worse still, many of these errors go undetected if you’re only looking at aggregate metrics or server-side logs.

JavaScript exceptions happen in the browser, on the client side, and typically don’t surface in backend monitoring tools at all. This makes having a dedicated frontend monitoring solution essential.

For example, let’s say a third-party analytics script throws a TypeError that stops a checkout button from working. Your backend will never know the user clicked it because the event was never triggered. From the server’s perspective, everything looks fine, even though users are getting increasingly frustrated that they can’t click a check-out button, and silently abandoning their carts as a result. You’re now taking a serious hit on conversion rates without being able to understand the real reason why. What’s worse, you may not even notice until you start looking at commercial site trends a few weeks later because there’s nothing alerting you to the error in real-time. 

As another example, consider a React component that fails to render because of a null value passed into a prop. The page may appear blank or glitchy to the user, but unless you’re monitoring frontend exceptions, that failure won’t be reflected in typical performance dashboards or error logs.

Even more insidiously, some errors might only affect certain combinations of browsers, screen sizes, or device types—making them impossible to catch with synthetic testing or server-side logging alone. Without real-user visibility, these bugs stay hidden until users complain or stop using your website.

Embrace’s JavaScript exception monitoring gives you full visibility into the errors affecting your users. The Embrace SDK captures and reports unhandled exceptions automatically in the dashboard. It also gives you the option of manually reporting handled exceptions by calling the API, so you can glean insight into issues that are problematic, but not totally catastrophic, to your end user experience. 

With this feature, you can:

• Capture all uncaught JavaScript exceptions across your web app automatically, including both synchronous and asynchronous errors.
• Reproduce issues quickly with full context: stack traces, source file references, affected URLs, and browser/device/environment details.
• See how errors impact real users by connecting exceptions to user sessions, funnel stages, and other behavioral insights.
• Prioritize effectively by filtering and grouping errors based on frequency, severity, and affected user segments.

What makes Embrace different is its user-centric approach. Instead of treating JavaScript exceptions as isolated log entries, Embrace ties them to the actual user experience—so you know whether that error caused a user to rage click, abandon a session, or never convert.

We do this by integrating exceptions directly into the User Timeline, giving you the complete trail of technical and behavioral events that lead up to the error. 

In the Embrace dashboard, you start off by viewing a summary page of all exceptions. Aggregated metrics allow you to spot high-level trends and patterns, while a list of exceptions lets you dive into individual issues based on how many users they’re impacting. From there you can dig into any unique exception to view a stacktrace, and then actually see an instance of that exception in a single user’s timeline of their unique web session. This provides the full context you need to truly understand the conditions and behaviors that preceded the error, so you don’t have to spend time manually triggering and reproducing the issue. All of the steps are there for you to retrace already. 

This holistic view helps frontend, platform, and product teams work together to resolve the most impactful issues, faster.

JavaScript exceptions create real disruptions to user experiences. Having a tool that not only captures these issues in aggregate, but that provides you with the detailed context you need to properly troubleshoot them, can go a long way in helping you to optimize your app performance. 

Whether you’re debugging a broken feature, measuring release health, or ensuring that your high-value funnels are performing flawlessly, Embrace gives you the insights you need to ship better experiences, every time.

Check out our docs for more detail about our JavaScript exception morning capabilities, or get started with Embrace yourself for free. 

If you’d like to learn more about Embrace’s Web RUM product from the engineers who built it, join our webinar on July 26th.