Browser Monitoring Client-Side Setup

Overview

The Datadog Browser SDK enables Real User Monitoring (RUM) for your web applications, providing comprehensive visibility into user experience and application performance. With RUM, you can monitor page load times, user interactions, resource loading, and application errors in real-time.

RUM helps you:

Monitor user experience with detailed performance metrics for page loads, user actions, and resource requests
Track user journeys through your application with Session Replay capabilities
Identify performance bottlenecks and correlate frontend and backend performance with APM traces

The Browser SDK supports all modern desktop and mobile browsers and provides automatic collection of key performance metrics, user interactions, and application errors. After setup, you can manage your RUM configurations per application in Datadog and visualize the collected data in dashboards and the RUM Explorer.

This page describes how to instrument your web applications with the Datadog Browser SDK. The Browser SDK supports Real User Monitoring (RUM), Error Tracking, Session Replay, and Product Analytics.

The Browser SDK supports all modern desktop and mobile browsers.

Setup

Choose your setup method:

Server-side auto-instrumentation: Automatically inject the RUM SDK into HTML responses through your web server or proxy.
Agentic Onboarding (in Preview): Use AI coding agents (Cursor, Claude Code) to automatically instrument your application with one prompt.
Manual client-side setup (below): Manually add the SDK to your application code.

Step 1 - Create the application in the UI

In Datadog, navigate to Digital Experience > Add an Application and select the JavaScript (JS) application type.
Enter a name for your application, then click Create Application. This generates a clientToken and an applicationId for your application.

Step 2 - Install the Browser SDK

Choose the installation method for the Browser SDK.

Installing through Node Package Manager (npm) registry is recommended for modern web applications. The Browser SDK is packaged with the rest of your frontend JavaScript code. It has no impact on page load performance. However, the SDK may miss errors, resources, and user actions triggered before the SDK is initialized. Datadog recommends using a matching version with the Browser Logs SDK.

Add @datadog/browser-rum to your package.json file, for example if you use npm cli:

npm install --save @datadog/browser-rum

Installing through CDN async is recommended for web applications with performance targets. The Browser SDK loads from Datadog's CDN asynchronously, ensuring the SDK download does not impact page load performance. However, the SDK may miss errors, resources, and user actions triggered before the SDK is initialized.

Add the generated code snippet to the head tag of every HTML page you want to monitor in your application.

Installing through CDN sync is recommended for collecting all events. The Browser SDK loads from Datadog's CDN synchronously, ensuring the SDK loads first and collects all errors, resources, and user actions. This method may impact page load performance.

Add the generated code snippet to the head tag (in front of any other script tags) of every HTML page you want to monitor in your application. Placing the script tag higher and loading it synchronously ensures Datadog RUM can collect all performance data and errors.

Step 3 - Initialize the Browser SDK

The SDK should be initialized as early as possible in the app lifecycle. This ensures all measurements are captured correctly.

In the initialization snippet, set an environment name, service name, and client token. See the full list of initialization parameters.

import { datadogRum } from '@datadog/browser-rum';

datadogRum.init({
   applicationId: '<APP_ID>',
   clientToken: '<CLIENT_TOKEN>',
   // `site` refers to the Datadog site parameter of your organization
   // see https://docs.datadoghq.com/getting_started/site/
   site: '<DATADOG_SITE>',
  //  service: 'my-web-application',
  //  env: 'production',
  //  version: '1.0.0',
});

Types are compatible with TypeScript >= 3.8.2. For earlier versions of TypeScript, import JavaScript sources and use global variables to avoid any compilation issues.

import '@datadog/browser-rum/bundle/datadog-rum'

window.DD_RUM.init({
  ...
})

<script>
  window.DD_RUM.onReady(function() {
    window.DD_RUM.init({
      clientToken: '<CLIENT_TOKEN>',
      applicationId: '<APP_ID>',
      // `site` refers to the Datadog site parameter of your organization
      // see https://docs.datadoghq.com/getting_started/site/
      site: '<DATADOG_SITE>',
      //  service: 'my-web-application',
      //  env: 'production',
      //  version: '1.0.0',
    });
  })
</script>

<script>
    window.DD_RUM && window.DD_RUM.init({
      clientToken: '<CLIENT_TOKEN>',
      applicationId: '<APP_ID>',
      // `site` refers to the Datadog site parameter of your organization
      // see https://docs.datadoghq.com/getting_started/site/
      site: '<DATADOG_SITE>',
      //  service: 'my-web-application',
      //  env: 'production',
      //  version: '1.0.0',

    });
</script>

To be compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and similar regulations, the Browser SDK lets you provide the tracking consent value at initialization.

Configure Content Security Policy (CSP)

If you're using the Datadog Content Security Policy (CSP) integration on your site, see the CSP documentation for additional setup steps.

Set session sampling rates

To control the data your application sends to Datadog RUM, you can specify a sampling rate for RUM sessions while initializing the Browser SDK. For example, to sample 80% of sessions, set sessionSampleRate to 80:

datadogRum.init({
  applicationId: '<APP_ID>',
  clientToken: '<CLIENT_TOKEN>',
  site: '<DATADOG_SITE>',
  sessionSampleRate: 80,
  sessionReplaySampleRate: 20,
  // ... other configuration options
});

For more information, see Browser RUM & Session Replay Sampling.

Start monitoring your application

Now that you've completed the basic setup for RUM, your application is collecting browser errors and you can start monitoring and debugging issues in real-time.

Visualize the data collected in dashboards or create a search query in the RUM Explorer.

Your application appears as pending on the Applications page until Datadog starts receiving data.

Next steps

See Advanced Configuration.

Browser Monitoring Client-Side Setup

Overview

Setup

Step 1 - Create the application in the UI

Step 2 - Install the Browser SDK

Step 3 - Initialize the Browser SDK

Configure Content Security Policy (CSP)

Set session sampling rates

Start monitoring your application

Next steps

Further reading

How can I help you today?

Browser Monitoring Client-Side Setup

Overview

Setup

Step 1 - Create the application in the UI

Step 2 - Install the Browser SDK

Step 3 - Initialize the Browser SDK

Configure tracking consent (GDPR compliance)

Configure Content Security Policy (CSP)

Set session sampling rates

Start monitoring your application

Next steps

Further reading

How can I help you today?