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What monitoring and analytics does a small app actually need?

Two things: error tracking with stack traces and release attribution, and privacy-respecting web analytics. Add product analytics only once you have a specific funnel question you cannot answer.

Surveyed 17 September 2026

Monitor product and usage

Open in Tools →
No.Tool
  1. 01
    Sentry

    Error tracking and performance monitoring platform that surfaces crashes, slow queries, and regressions in real time.

    Developer Tools
  2. 02
    Datadog

    APM, logs, metrics, real user monitoring, and security monitoring in one observability platform at enterprise scale.

    Developer Tools
  3. 03
    New Relic

    Observability platform covering APM, infrastructure monitoring, logs, and AI-assisted analysis.

    Developer Tools
  4. 04
    Honeycomb

    Observability platform built on high-cardinality event data and distributed tracing for debugging microservices.

    Developer Tools
  5. 05
    Axiom

    Cloud-native log management for querying logs, traces, and events on a serverless architecture.

    Developer Tools
  6. 06
    BetterStack

    Combined uptime monitoring, log management, and incident response, including status pages and on-call scheduling.

    Developer Tools
  7. 07
    Posthog

    Open-source product platform combining analytics, web analytics, feature flags, and SQL-queryable event data.

    Developer Tools
  8. 08
    Amplitude

    Enterprise product analytics offering funnel, retention, and path analyses with cohorting and experimentation.

    Developer Tools
  9. 09
    Mixpanel

    Event-based product analytics with funnels, retention, and impact reports, plus session replay and experiments.

    Developer Tools
  10. 10
    Plausible

    Cookieless, lightweight web analytics that is GDPR-compliant and can be run on your own servers.

    Developer Tools

A curated selection in editorial order. Use the fit and evidence to judge it for your task. Something missing?

What to look for

  • 01Does error tracking tie a failure to the deploy that introduced it? That link is most of the debugging value.
  • 02Does the analytics need a cookie banner? Cookieless tools avoid the consent problem entirely.
  • 03Can an agent query it? Telemetry reachable over MCP turns incident triage into a conversation.

Common questions

What is the difference between error monitoring and observability?
Error monitoring catches and groups exceptions with their stack traces. Observability traces requests through your whole system so you can ask why something was slow, not only what threw.
Can I avoid a cookie banner?
Yes, if your analytics sets no cookies and stores no personal identifiers. Several self-hostable tools work this way and still give you the traffic numbers that matter.

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