Observability isn’t just for big tech companies, large IT infrastructure or non spatial projects it’s for all web applications too. In this lightning talk, I’ll show how you can get immediate insights into the real-world behaviour of your applications by using monitoring tools such as Sentry.

The talk will use real world examples using Sentry which is a source-available platform with a strong open core model. While not fully OSI open source, it offers transparency, self-hosting, and a generous license for individuals and small teams. In this talk Sentry is used as a practical example, the focus is on core principles of observability and monitoring that apply broadly.

We’ll start with a quick look at what observability means when working with modern web applications, and why traditional logging alone doesn’t cut it. Then we will show examples of how monitoring integrates into applications, capturing uncaught exceptions, tracking performance issues like slow API calls or render delays, and tying everything back to real user sessions.

I’ll highlight how observability fits into your development workflow and surfacing issues in real time, grouping similar errors,. You’ll also see how performance monitoring works out of the box and might you might need to tweak to get useful information, for example retrieving what is displayed on a spatial map.

Whether you’re debugging spatial maps not showing, flaky frontends or mysterious server errors, this talk will give you a fast, practical intro to making your apps more observable using open source tools you can start with today.