Instana & Instabug Join Forces for Efficient Mobile-to-Server Network Visibility

Instana and Instabug are closing the end-to-end visibility gap for mobile app teams and the operations teams that support them. By enabling developers and SREs to seamlessly connect on-device and backend network flows, teams can - for the first time - resolve app quality incidents quickly and definitively.

The mobile app market is an increasingly crowded space, requiring constant innovation and clear differentiators to stand out from competing apps. The mobile app market was estimated at $187.58 billion globally in 2021, and growth projections are only increasing as the industry continues to expand. With over 700 million apps being downloaded in a day, app speed, stability, and reliability will be decisive factors that motivate users to choose your app before any other.

Since the majority of mobile app users abandon apps if they take too long to load, performance has an incredible impact on your app’s success. By monitoring your app’s performance consistently, you learn your app’s performance issues before anyone even reports them, or most users have to experience them. This gives you a head start on fixing the issues while providing you the tools to keep your user base informed of the steps you’re taking and reducing the mean time to repair (MTTR).

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Proactive Quality Management to Increase Efficiency in Issue Resolution

Quality management tools can help you monitor different elements affecting your performance. Service disruptions usually are a result of network issues and a lot of factors can go into your network performance. Some are in the developer’s control, but unpredictable issues can still occur from the users’ side.

Disruptions happen, but the faster you can resolve a disruption in your service, the better it is for your user experience and your overall business. Understanding incident metrics, like MTTR, can help companies ensure they are maintaining a healthy infrastructure and services. For instance, systems with a shorter MTTR will have less of an impact on business outcomes while a longer MTTR will result in a negative user experience, business disruptions, and financial losses.Creating a proactive approach to triaging your performance issues can help teams detect, diagnose, and fix issues before they affect your app’s performance.

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Instana and Instabug: Reducing MTTR By Triaging Device to Backend Network Logs

By tracking the full round trip of your network requests as seen on-device to backend, you can identify and act on issues faster. A device view of frequent network failures can help you detect backend issues faster before they cause considerable issues and outages.

Instana and Instabug are excited to announce the ability for mobile teams to create a direct connection between on-device quality degradation and the backend calls that might be contributing to them. By linking the two developer experiences, users of both have easy access to critical debugging information, enabling them to identify issues faster, determine the true root cause quicker and resolve them before their users, and business, are impacted.

Mike Mallo, VP of Product at Instana said “I see this as an industry first to connect the application SRE with the mobile developer by bringing together the most modern APM Observability solution with the best mobile development toolkits. I’m so excited for our joint customers to be more efficient with this integration.”

The collaboration between Instana and Instabug fills a current gap in the industry by creating end-to-end visibility for users.

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End-to-End Visibility

With the Instana and Instabug integration you now have complete visibility into your request flows, enabling more effective mobile teams.

VP of Product of Instabug, Kenny Johnston, is thrilled with the new capabilities unlocked to developers, saying, “Developer experience matters. Improving a developer’s ability to quickly investigate, determine the true root cause, and fix a crash makes all development more efficient, reduces MTTR and - in the end - delivers a better user experience for your mobile app. Every app has a backend, and by connecting front-end crashes to backend observability Instabug and Instana ensure developers can rapidly and confidently fix app quality issues.”

So how does this all work?

You're notified through Instabug that the crash rate for your application has increased and it is affecting 20% of your users. From the mobile-side, you see the server is failing, indicated by the 500 response code, but you have not implemented the correct mechanism to handle all 500 responses on the mobile-side. What do you do next?

By navigating to the network logs on the Instabug dashboard, it shows the response failure and gives you confidence the crash is caused by a backend error. Not only that, it allows you to then seamlessly navigate to Instana and to the waterfall view of the exact trace.

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You’ll be redirected to the unbounded analytics of the specific trace ID, allowing you to further debug your server failures and close the loop on why the failure is happening aided by the complete context that Instana provides on the backend.

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The Instana + Instabug integration now gives you a full picture of device-to-datastore issues and allows teams to efficiently determine root cause and address issues faster.

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Getting started with Instabug and Instana

Instabug allows mobile teams to add and link their Instana dashboard to the Instabug dashboard to get a backend/server overview of the network flow. To begin using Instana and Instabug together, users should take the following steps:

1. Go to the Instabug integrations page
2. Users will be able to authenticate, test, and finish setup from the integrations page
3. The link will then be shown in the network logs of the bug and crash reporting pages in Instabug
4. Instabug will authenticate that the added link is from Instana, and redirect the Instabug dashboard user to the correct Instana instance