1. The blind spot Observe closes
With passwords, authentication happened on your backend: you compared a hash and returned success or failure. Your backend logs told the whole story. With passkeys, authentication moves to the client. Whether a login succeeds now depends on the operating system, the browser, the credential manager, whether Face ID appears and whether a device ships a WebAuthn bug. None of that reaches your backend. A user who never gets past the passkey dialog produces no backend event at all. They simply disappear. That gap is what Corbado Observe measures. For the wider argument, see Why you need authentication observability for CIAM.2. How data flows through Observe
The two integration paths differ only in step 1. From step 2 onwards they run through the same pipeline.1
Capture
Autocapture observes what your web frontend already does. Custom events are events you emit yourself, from the web, iOS or Android SDK.
2
Send
Events are batched and sent asynchronously to Corbado. Delivery never blocks your UI and never sits in the authentication path.
3
Classify
Raw events are mapped onto the data model: flows (login, sign-up, recovery), subflows (passkey login, password enrollment, email OTP), decisions, users and tags. This is closer to process mining than to a flat event log, which is what makes it possible to reconstruct a journey including loops, retries and method switches.
4
Pre-calculate
Classified data is rolled into time series bucketed hourly, daily, monthly and total. Dashboards read a prepared series instead of scanning raw events, which is what keeps them fast on large projects. Cadence is automatic and can be tuned under Observe → Settings → Pre-calculation.
5
Analyze and debug
The management console reads pre-calculated series for funnels, friction and error analysis and device breakdowns. It reads classified events directly for user search and single-journey reconstruction.
3. What Observe is not
Because Observe is never in the authentication path, an SDK failure costs you telemetry, never a login.
4. Observe vs. Corbado Connect
See Corbado Connect if you want to add passkeys to your existing identity provider.
5. How Observe differs from your existing tooling
Observe complements these rather than replacing them. It is deliberately narrow: the client side of authentication, modeled properly. For a category-by-category comparison, see Which tool reports the real authentication success rate?
6. Next steps
Integration paths
Autocapture vs. custom events.
Compatibility & constraints
Platforms, requirements and limits.