Skip to main content

Multiplayer for developer workflows

What is Multiplayer?​

Multiplayer is a full-stack session recorder designed to integrate seamlessly with your existing development and observability stack. It provides end-to-end visibility into user sessions while capturing all the technical context developers need to debug and resolve issues quickly.

What Multiplayer is:What Multiplayer isn't:
A comprehensive session recording tool that captures full technical context (frontend data, backend traces, logs, request/response content and headers, etc.)A replacement for your APM / observability tools for monitoring and performance at scale
Compatible with any observability platform, language, framework, architecture or deploymentA substitute for issue management systems like Jira or GitHub Issues
Built for team collaboration on technical problemsA standalone ticketing system

Think of Multiplayer as the missing connection between user behavior and system behavior: it unifies what the user experienced with what your systems did, eliminating the hours spent correlating data across tools.

When should you use Multiplayer?​

Primary use case: complex technical debugging​

Multiplayer excels at helping developers quickly diagnose and resolve technical problems that traditionally require extensive investigation:

  • Highly complex, full-stack bugs that span multiple services or system layers
  • Intermittent issues that are difficult to reproduce in development environments
  • Hard-to-reproduce problems that only occur under specific user conditions
  • Unexpected system behaviors that logs alone can't explain
  • Production issues in mission-critical applications requiring rapid resolution

If you're maintaining complex applications where bugs require correlation across logs, traces, metrics, and user actions, Multiplayer becomes essential for efficient debugging.

Extended use cases: QA, UX, feature development​

Thanks to Multiplayer's versatile installation options, multiple recording modes, and developer-focused features it can also help in these use cases:

  • Feature Development: See exactly how your system behaves end-to-end in real-world conditions. Record a session while testing new features, observe actual production behavior across your entire stack, get suggestions from AI coding assistants, and confidently make changes knowing you can instantly verify nothing broke downstream. No more guessing about side effects or waiting for bug reports to understand impact.

  • QA and Testing: QA teams can share failing tests with developers instantly, complete with full technical context. Multiplayer complements E2E testing tools like Playwright or Cypress by capturing what happened when a test failed—network conditions, backend traces, timing issues, and system state—providing the missing critical information that test runners alone can't give you. Turn "the test failed" into "here's exactly why it failed."

  • Product and UX Analysis: PMs and UX teams can study real user behavior for specific cohorts using conditional recording. Set conditions once (user segment, feature flag, specific workflow), and Multiplayer automatically records matching sessions in the background. Proactively identify UX bottlenecks, understand where users struggle, validate design decisions with real usage data, and improve the product based on actual behavior rather than assumptions.

Developer-first features​

Multiplayer isn't just a passive recorder: it's an active debugging platform built around how developers actually work.

  • Rich annotation and context per session recording: View, share, and annotate every aspect of a session recording from adding sketches on top of the recording, to commenting on every data point (user action, API, trace, span, etc.)
  • Interactive Notebooks: Interactive sandbox environments to test complex API integrations, collaborate on feature requirements or visualize data sets. 
  • Test Case Generation: Convert a real user session recording directly into a reproducible test case. Capture the exact sequence of events that triggered a bug and turn it into an automated test to prevent regression.
  • Dependency System Maps: Visualize how services interact and where failures cascade
  • System Dashboard:A summary of all your system information (components, APIs, dependencies, etc.) without you ever having to manually draw/update a diagram.
  • Repository Integration: Connect your GitHub, GitLab or BitBucket repos

The pain points Multiplayer solves​

As a developer, how much of your time goes to actually solving problems versus gathering information about them? Grepping through log files, jumping between monitoring tools, scheduling "alignment" calls to understand what users actually experienced. These activities eat hours that could be spent on value-add work.

Information fragmentation

  • Data scattered across APM tools, log aggregators, error trackers, and support tickets
  • Hours spent grepping through log files and correlating timestamps
  • Missing technical context that would make root cause obvious
  • Inability to see user actions alongside system behavior

Communication overhead

  • "Alignment" calls to understand what the end-user is seeing
  • Back-and-forth with users or support to gather reproduction steps
  • Time lost translating user descriptions into technical terms

Reproduction difficulty

  • Bugs that "work on my machine" but fail in production
  • Issues that only occur with specific user data or workflows
  • Complex user journeys impossible to manually recreate

Delayed time to resolution

  • Days waiting for enough information to even start investigating
  • Multiple deploy cycles testing different hypotheses

Multiplayer addresses these by capturing the complete session context upfront. One recording gives you everything you'd otherwise spend hours gathering.

How Developer Teams Use Multiplayer​

Multiplayer offers flexible workflows to match how your team debugs issues:

On-Demand Recording for Bug Investigation​

Record sessions when investigating specific issues, capturing both the user experience and full technical telemetry. You can use the in-app widget, browser extension, or SDK / CLI apps.

Overview:

  • Developer/QA records session either on-demand (manually start and stop) or in "continuous mode", where sessions with any errors and exceptions are automatically saved
  • Developer/QA reviews the end-user session in the Multiplayer UI, and/or adds notes
  • Developer/QA proceeds to suggest bug fix and/or add session link to their issue tracking tool (e.g. Linear)

how end-users can record

Proactive session search and review​

Support and engineering teams can browse and search for specific user sessions in the Multiplayer UI, allowing them to proactively investigate patterns or retroactively examine issues.

Background recording of technical issues and bugs of all sessions for specific cohorts of users can be done through the Multiplayer UI, using the "conditional mode". Teams can set sessions to be recorded based on pre-selected conditions.

Overview:

  • Support and/or developers enable "conditional recording mode" in the Multiplayer UI
  • Developer/QA reviews the end-user session in the Multiplayer UI, and/or adds notes
  • Developer/QA proceeds to suggest bug fix and/or add session link in their issue tracking tool

conditional recording

Session recording from support tickets / bug reports​

When support escalates an issue, the session recording comes with it. Review exactly what the user did, what your systems did in response and add any relevant notes and comments.

No need to ask for reproduction steps or schedule alignment calls.

How developers can add notes to session recordings

AI-Powered Investigation​

Feed session data directly into AI tools through Multiplayer's MCP server integration or VS Code extension.

Your copilots and AI IDEs have the complete system context they need: user actions, traces, logs, requests, responses, header data, plus user annotations. Query sessions using natural language and generate insights without manual data extraction.

AI prompt with full stack session recording

FAQs​

Next steps​

👀 If this is the first time you’ve heard about us, you may want to see full stack session recordings in action. You can do that in our free sandbox: sandbox.multiplayer.app

🚀 If you’re ready to trial Multiplayer with your own app, you can follow the Multiplayer configuration steps. You can start a free plan at any time: go.multiplayer.app