Instabug vs New Relic

In this post, we will take a look at two of the top APM tools out there, Instabug vs New Relic. These tools can help you monitor not only your app’s crashes but also errors, network requests, battery consumption, and more.

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Network calls play a huge role in the speed and responsiveness of your app. Usually, network performance is tracked on the server-side. And while that is important it only tells half of the story. Both Instabug and New Relic let you track client-side network calls. You will be able to get a drill-down look at network performance and track HTTP requests by their response times, errors, and more.

The worst-case scenario for any app is encountering a session-ending crash. Both Instabug and New Relic help you stay ahead of negative reviews with detailed crash reporting. With both, you can assess the stack-trace information that leads up to the crash to help narrow down fixes. You can also set up alerts to stay up to date with any new critical issues.

To help narrow down investigations and get a sense of how your app is performing a lot of details are available for every user. You can filter reports based on OS version, App version, and device.

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Built for mobile

While New Relic is built with backend and DevOps teams in mind, Instabug understands the unique challenges of mobile development and is built for mobile developers and engineers. Instabug detects all critical issues affecting your users, whether it is a crash, slow network call, slow transition, or app hang.

With strong mobile experience, Instabug’s APM goes a lot deeper. App launch time monitoring helps you set a good first impression which is key with mobile users. You will also be able to track ANR errors, OOM errores, app hangs, and forced restarts to make sure users aren’t having a frustrating experience with your app. Additionally, Instabug automatically captures the performance of your app's key flows and enables you to create custom execution traces to track the performance of specific logic and code traces.

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Align your team on a north-star performance metric

App performance can be difficult to assess when taken as a big picture. Assessing whether or not precious engineering resources need to be devoted to improving performance is one of the biggest challenges mobile teams face. Instabug’s Apdex score helps you do just that. With one tell-all score that encompasses app, network, and UI performance as well as app stability, you can make actionable decisions faster. The app Apdex score will tell you right on the dashboard whether your users are seeing a satisfying, tolerating, or frustrating experience.

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Reproduce and fix issues faster with better crash reporting

The most important part of a crash reporting tool is being able to detect and diagnose a wide range of crashes. While New Relic only supports traditional handled and unhandled exceptions, Instabug supports all crash types that you might encounter to ensure that any error is quickly identifiable. This includes:

• Out Of Memory (OOM) errors on mobile (OOM errors happen on avg ~5x more than normal crashes).
• Application Not Responding (ANR) on Android
• NDK crash detection
• App hang detection
• Forced restart detection
• iOS-specific crashes such as C++ Exceptions and SwiftUI Exception.
• Network Crashes: Crashes due to Network errors (4xx, 5xx, and slow requests)

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Instabug also gives you more information beyond just the crash. The conditions that led up to the crash are key to figuring out and fixing the issue and Instabug's session profiler captures the state and timeline of the device (memory, CPU, battery, and connectivity) in the last 60 seconds before the app crashes. Another useful feature is repro steps, which makes reproducing issues a breeze by replaying the interactions the user made with your app up until a crash is reported, grouped by each screen name.

For hard-to-debug issues like ANRs and app hangs, Instabug's powerful flame graphs engine gives you advanced debugging capabilities to quickly reveal their root cause.

You can take it a step further with powerful filtering across all data points of reported errors including custom key-value attributes. Instabug also supports filtering on feature flags and experiments (A/B tests) to help new features meet your standards for stability before they reach all of your users.

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Best-in-class bug reporting

Instabug offers the most powerful bug reporting tool for mobile apps on the market. With Instabug’s bug reporting features, your users can easily report bugs that don’t actually crash the app with a simple shake of their phone. For each bug report, Instabug captures a screenshot and lets your users annotate it or add more screenshots or a video recording to explain further. Instabug also automatically captures all the device and environment details, console logs, network logs, user attributes, repro steps, and session profiler to help you quickly reproduce and fix the bug.

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Advanced and fully customizable alerts and notifications

Instabug helps you stay on top of incoming issues with a powerful and fully customizable rules engine that allows you to create custom alerts and notifications for virtually any scenario. This will help you keep track of emerging issues and understand their impact on your users as well as enable you to quickly any regressing issues.

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Monitor and debug your app store reviews

Instabug's App Ratings and Reviews captures all the ratings and reviews your app receives, enabling you to monitor the app store performance of each release and quickly identify emerging issues. More importantly, Instabug automatically identifies sessions that submit in-app ratings and allows you to watch exactly what led to them through Session Replay.

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Actively gather user feedback and app reviews

Often the best way to understand what your users think is to simply ask them. Instabug's In-App Surveys gives you the power to actively source valuable user feedback to inform your roadmap and ensure it is aligned with your users' expectations. Additionally, you can prompt happy users to rate and review your app on the store and replay the sessions of unhappy users to find the source of their frustration.

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Automate rollout monitoring and management

Instabug's Release Management gives you full control over the progress, adoption, health, and app store performance of your version rollouts in one place to help you quickly catch problematic releases and mitigate their impact. You can also set rules to automatically pause a version rollout when it falls below specified stability, performance, and app store rating thresholds, as well as create a rollout schedule to automate staged releases on the Play Store.