Monitor Electron Applications Using the Browser SDK

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Overview

Electron is an open source framework that can be used to build cross-platform macOS and Windows desktop applications.

You can install and configure the Datadog Browser SDK to start monitoring applications built using Electron.

Note: The Browser SDK only supports monitoring the renderer processes of an application. It does not initialize or monitor anything installed on the main process. For more information, see Electron’s documentation on its renderer process.

The Datadog Browser SDK only supports monitoring the renderer processes of an Electron application

Installation

To install the Datadog Browser SDK to support Electron apps:

Set up and install RUM Browser Monitoring inside every renderer process, following the steps for CDN sync, CDN async, or npm.
Set the allowFallbackToLocalStorage parameter to true in the RUM initialization configuration of each renderer process, as shown below.
Note: This setting allows Datadog to collect RUM data without relying on browser cookies.
- If you are targeting pages available on the internet (using the https:// protocol), you do not need this parameter.
- if you are embedding pages inside your application (using the file:// protocol), Datadog needs to store sessions in local storage, as cookies are not available.
```
datadogRum.init({
  applicationId: '<DATADOG_APPLICATION_ID>',
  clientToken: '<DATADOG_CLIENT_TOKEN>',
  site: '<DATADOG_SITE>',
  ...
  allowFallbackToLocalStorage: true
  });
```
Once you’ve configured the SDK correctly, your data populates the RUM Explorer.

Troubleshooting

Support for hybrid Electron applications

The same-origin policy prevents tracking an application for the same session in which pages load from both local (file://) and remote (http(s)://).

This means that an application that uses Electron to embed a landing page, then later redirects the user to a website hosted on the Internet results in two sessions being created for that user - one for the embedded local files (file://) landing part of the application, and one for the remote part (https:// files available on the internet).

Short-lived sessions for instances with multiple windows at once

An issue with local storage replication latency between windows can cause a short-lived session to be created (<1 second). To work around this, ensure multiple windows are created and initialized with a gap of more than 10 ms.