Firecrawl Observability

Overview

Monitor Firecrawl web scraping pipelines for success rates, credit consumption, content quality, and latency. Key signals: scrape success rate, crawl job completion, credit burn velocity, extraction quality (did markdown actually contain useful content vs error pages), and webhook delivery health.

Prerequisites

• An approved telemetry schema that uses aggregate measurements and opaque job identifiers.
• Named alert owners, escalation thresholds, data-retention rules, and dashboards with restricted access.
• Synthetic fixtures for alert testing and a documented way to suppress noisy signals without hiding incidents.

Output

Produce an observability receipt with metric definitions, dashboard reference, alert thresholds, test result, owner, and review date. Do not send page content, API keys, or personal data to metrics, traces, or alert payloads.

Examples

Use a synthetic target to create one successful crawl and one policy rejection. Confirm dashboards count both outcomes by category, an alert fires only on the configured threshold, and the alert contains an opaque job ID rather than captured content.

Key Metrics

Instructions

Step 1: Instrumented Firecrawl Wrapper

import FirecrawlApp from "@mendable/firecrawl-js";

const firecrawl = new FirecrawlApp({
  apiKey: process.env.FIRECRAWL_API_KEY!,
});

// Counters (use your metrics library: prom-client, statsd, datadog, etc.)
function emit(metric: string, value: number, tags?: Record<string, string>) {
  console.log(JSON.stringify({ metric, value, tags, timestamp: Date.now() }));
}

export async function instrumentedScrape(url: string) {
  const start = Date.now();
  try {
    const result = await firecrawl.scrapeUrl(url, {
      formats: ["markdown"],
      onlyMainContent: true,
    });

    const duration = Date.now() - start;
    const quality = evaluateQuality(result);

    emit("firecrawl_scrapes_total", 1, { status: "success" });
    emit("firecrawl_scrape_duration_ms", duration);
    emit("firecrawl_credits_used", 1);
    emit("firecrawl_content_quality", 1, { quality });

    return result;
  } catch (error: any) {
    emit("firecrawl_scrapes_total", 1, {
      status: "error",
      error_code: String(error.statusCode || "unknown"),
    });
    emit("firecrawl_scrape_duration_ms", Date.now() - start);
    throw error;
  }
}

function evaluateQuality(result: any): string {
  const md = result.markdown || "";
  if (md.length < 100) return "empty";
  if (/404|not found|access denied|captcha/i.test(md)) return "error_page";
  if (!/^#{1,3}\s/m.test(md)) return "no_structure";
  return "good";
}

Step 2: Credit Consumption Monitor

async function checkCreditHealth() {
  const response = await fetch("https://api.firecrawl.dev/v1/team/credits", {
    headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.FIRECRAWL_API_KEY}` },
  });
  const data = await response.json();

  emit("firecrawl_credits_remaining", data.credits_remaining || 0);

  if (data.credits_remaining < 1000) {
    console.warn(`LOW CREDITS: ${data.credits_remaining} remaining`);
    emit("firecrawl_credit_alert", 1, { level: "warning" });
  }
  if (data.credits_remaining < 100) {
    emit("firecrawl_credit_alert", 1, { level: "critical" });
  }

  return data;
}

// Run every hour
setInterval(checkCreditHealth, 3600000);

Step 3: Crawl Job Tracking

export async function monitoredCrawl(url: string, limit: number) {
  const start = Date.now();

  const job = await firecrawl.asyncCrawlUrl(url, {
    limit,
    scrapeOptions: { formats: ["markdown"] },
  });

  emit("firecrawl_crawl_jobs_total", 1, { status: "started" });

  // Poll with metrics
  let status = await firecrawl.checkCrawlStatus(job.id);
  while (status.status === "scraping") {
    emit("firecrawl_crawl_progress", status.completed || 0, { jobId: job.id });
    await new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, 5000));
    status = await firecrawl.checkCrawlStatus(job.id);
  }

  const duration = Date.now() - start;
  emit("firecrawl_crawl_jobs_total", 1, { status: status.status });
  emit("firecrawl_crawl_duration_ms", duration);
  emit("firecrawl_crawl_pages", status.data?.length || 0);
  emit("firecrawl_credits_used", status.data?.length || 0);

  return status;
}

Step 4: Prometheus Alert Rules

groups:
  - name: firecrawl
    rules:
      - alert: FirecrawlHighFailureRate
        expr: rate(firecrawl_scrapes_total{status="error"}[1h]) / rate(firecrawl_scrapes_total[1h]) > 0.1
        annotations:
          summary: "Firecrawl error rate exceeds 10%"

      - alert: FirecrawlCreditLow
        expr: firecrawl_credits_remaining < 500
        annotations:
          summary: "Firecrawl credits below 500 — refill soon"

      - alert: FirecrawlHighLatency
        expr: histogram_quantile(0.95, firecrawl_scrape_duration_ms) > 15000
        annotations:
          summary: "Firecrawl p95 latency exceeds 15 seconds"

      - alert: FirecrawlPoorQuality
        expr: rate(firecrawl_content_quality{quality="empty"}[1h]) / rate(firecrawl_content_quality[1h]) > 0.2
        annotations:
          summary: "Over 20% of scrapes returning empty content"

Step 5: Dashboard Panels

Track these in Grafana/Datadog:

• Scrape volume: sum(rate(firecrawl_scrapes_total[5m])) by status
• Credit burn rate: sum(rate(firecrawl_credits_used[1h])) — credits/hour
• Latency p50/p95: histogram_quantile(0.5, firecrawl_scrape_duration_ms)
• Content quality: Pie chart of firecrawl_content_quality by quality label
• Credits remaining: Single stat with thresholds (green > 1000, yellow > 100, red < 100)

Error Handling

Resources

• Firecrawl API Reference
• prom-client (Prometheus for Node.js)
• Grafana Dashboards

Next Steps

For incident response, see firecrawl-incident-runbook.