There's been a lot of talk about the importance of observability and tracing for microservice-based applications. The usecases involved are usually focused on backend engineers and DevOps. But what about us front-end engineers? We also want to know how things work. More often than not, we get blamed first when something breaks, and it is important to understand the whole application, not just the front-end.
Currently, observability is not the top concern for front-end engineers, and I will show why it should be. In many cases, even if the application speed cannot be changed significantly, you can apply little tricks and add microinteractions to improve the UX. Besides, emerging tooling in OpenCensus and OpenTelemetry is easy to configure, enriches the existing data and helps developers to correlate traces between backend and UI.
