At a Glance:
highlight.io is an open-source, fullstack monitoring platform that combines session replay, error monitoring, logging, and traces, deployable via cloud or self-hosted Docker.
Overview:
highlight.io is an open-source fullstack monitoring platform designed for developers who need visibility across the frontend and backend. It unifies session replay, error monitoring, logging, and traces into a single tool, aiming to replace fragmented legacy monitoring setups. The platform captures user sessions with embedded console logs and errors, groups and alerts on backend exceptions, and provides searchable log and trace ingestion with automatic property collection. highlight.io supports a growing list of client and server SDKs, and it can be used either through a hosted free tier or deployed as a self-hosted hobby instance via Docker on Linux. Integrations with external tools are available across all monitoring pillars.
Key Decision Points:
Combined frontend and backend monitoring: Unifies session replay with error monitoring, logs, and traces, allowing developers to connect user actions to server-side issues.
Deployment flexibility: Available as a hosted free tier for immediate use or as a self-hosted Docker deployment on Linux for hobby setups requiring at least 8GB RAM, 4 CPUs, and 64GB disk space.
SDK-based instrumentation: Provides a growing set of SDKs for client and server environments, with installation described as a few lines of code.
Integrated context across pillars: Errors embed session replay to show user behavior before the bug; logs and traces embed associated sessions, errors, and related telemetry.
Alerting and grouping customization: Supports customizable error grouping rules and alerting with configurable thresholds and destinations across errors, logs, and traces.
Core Features:
Session replay: Records user sessions with embedded console logs and frontend errors, includes session commenting for team collaboration on user-facing issues.
Error monitoring: Groups errors with customizable rules, sends alerts based on configurable thresholds, and embeds session replay to show user context before each error.
Logging: Ingest and search server-side logs with automatic property collection, set log threshold alerts, and view associated sessions and errors.
Traces: Search across operation traces with automatic property collection, trigger alerts from trace data, and correlate traces with sessions, errors, and logs.
SDK support: A growing set of client and server SDKs installable with minimal code across different runtime environments.
Tool integrations: Supports integrations with external tools across session replay, error monitoring, logging, and traces.
Use Cases:
Developers debugging user-reported issues: Replay user sessions alongside embedded console logs and errors to understand exactly what a user did before encountering a bug.
Teams monitoring backend health with frontend context: Use logging and traces with embedded session replay and error data to connect server-side anomalies to user-facing impact.
Self-hosters evaluating monitoring tooling: Deploy a hobby instance via Docker to test a unified monitoring setup across session replay, errors, logs, and traces without immediate vendor commitment.
Open-Source Alternative Value:
highlight.io provides an open-source, unified monitoring option that replaces separate tools for session replay, error tracking, logging, and tracing. It offers a hosted free tier and a self-hosted Docker deployment, with SDK-based instrumentation across client and server environments. The project integrates frontend observability directly with backend telemetry, letting developers trace issues from user sessions to specific errors, logs, and operation traces within one platform. Its codebase is publicly available, and the project states it builds in public and accepts community input for future feature direction.
