Thomas Sobolik
Senior Technical Content Writer
Vercel lets frontend teams move fast. It pairs a built-in deployment pipeline with an Edge Network that caches your sites for fast retrieval, and Serverless Functions that handle backend work like authentication, form submission, and database queries. A single Vercel deployment ends up spanning several layers at once: the edge that serves and caches traffic, the functions that run your backend logic, and the frontend your users load. When a page slows down or a checkout starts failing, the signals for each of those layers usually live in different places, which makes a basic question harder than it should be: how is this project, on this route, actually doing right now?
The Datadog Vercel integration brings those layers together. Once connected, your Vercel logs, traces, and metrics flow into Datadog, where you can see how every project is performing without assembling the picture yourself: traffic and errors, function latency, cache behavior, firewall activity, and real user experience.
In this post, we will look at how the integration helps you:
Investigate any project by route, with logs, traces, and Real User Monitoring (RUM) together
Turn your function logs into business and performance metrics
Catch frontend regressions before users do with browser tests
See how every Vercel deployment is performing in one view
As soon as the integration is connected, Datadog gives you an out-of-the-box dashboard for Vercel, built from the logs and traces already flowing in. The dashboard covers what you need most, so you can:
Spot traffic spikes and trace them to a region or client
Catch slow or erroring serverless functions
Track how effectively the edge is caching
See what your firewall is blocking or challenging
Drill from a symptom into the logs and traces behind a request
Because every part of the view draws on the same data, you can move from a symptom to the specific function or request behind it, and extend the dashboard for whatever else your team needs to watch.
Investigate any project by route, with logs, traces, and RUM together
The integration also gives each Vercel project its own page in Datadog, organized the way developers think about frontend apps: by route. Instead of remembering the right tags or writing a query, you start from the project and open the route. Each route surfaces its request volume, error count and rate, and latency across percentiles, so a slow or failing route stands out right away. Next.js static-asset paths are grouped so they do not bury your application routes.
From there, the page keeps all three pillars together. Logs and traces are collected by the Datadog OTLP Intake Endpoint for Managed Platforms and pre-scoped to each project, so you can go straight from a suspect route into the requests behind it. RUM data sits on the same page, so the view that shows backend health also shows frontend experience.
Turn your function logs into business and performance metrics
Vercel Serverless Functions emit several types of logs, two of which are especially useful for monitoring. Request logs provide HTTP request data for calls to your functions, including the HTTP response code, region, request duration, function name, memory used, and the URL path invoked. This lets you track which functions are invoked most often and how well they perform. Application logs (output to console.log) let you collect custom log data to test and debug your functions, as well as business data such as transaction amounts.
With the integration in place, logs from your functions stream into Datadog, where you can archive and analyze them alongside logs from across your infrastructure. Using Log Explorer, you can isolate errors by filtering to logs tagged with a particular error code and looking for correlations with a specific region or deployment. You can also group error logs by endpoint URL to surface which function endpoints are experiencing the most errors. Selecting a log event gives you the full details, including the user’s location and browser and the memory the function used. That context makes it easier to diagnose errors like a function exceeding its established memory limits.
Application logs let you record business-specific data alongside function behavior. For example, an ecommerce app might emit a log for every successful checkout or record the dollar amount of each transaction. You can turn these logs into log-based metrics to store, visualize in dashboards, and alert on.
Catch frontend regressions before users do with browser tests
You can also integrate Datadog Synthetic Monitoring tests into your deployment pipeline to monitor the performance of your application’s frontend on every deploy. For example, browser tests can time and collect request data for each asset load across multi-step user flows.
Browser tests measure key frontend performance metrics for each step in a user journey, including the Largest Contentful Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift for each page load. Datadog also tracks the duration of each asset retrieval required to render the page (style sheets, JavaScript files, images) and surfaces any errors thrown. This helps you verify that Vercel’s Edge Network is serving your content efficiently and flag issues before they affect your SLAs.
Adding HTTP request steps to your browser tests surfaces the same data for calls to your serverless backend, including the URL path, HTTP method and status code, duration, and request size. You can see exactly how your Vercel Serverless Functions affect the end-to-end performance of common user flows.
Start monitoring your Vercel functions with Datadog
You can set up the integration in a few clicks from the Vercel Marketplace. Connect your Datadog org, pick or create an API key, and your logs and traces start flowing. RUM is also available as a next step. For the full walkthrough, see our documentation.
Sign up for a 14-day free trial to get started with Datadog.
