What Is Application Performance Management for Mobile Apps?

With millions of apps on the various app stores, standing out amongst the best takes significant technical effort. Apps that are buggy and constantly crash will always be called out by users. Users are not afraid to let you know what’s wrong with your app and give you a one-star rating. And with recent changes to how app store ratings work, a new update that contains bugs will drop an app’s rating immediately. App performance directly affects users' satisfaction and experience, and this negatively impacts key business metrics like downloads, usage, retention, and revenue.

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What is Application Performance Management?

At its core, application performance management is the monitoring and management of key app performance indicators. It can be confused with application performance monitoring because they have the same acronyms and there is a wide overlap between monitoring and management (see also: What is Mobile Application Performance Monitoring?). Application performance management aims to easily diagnose and assess problems in relation to how an app is performing.

Application performance management, like application performance monitoring, helps you assess how well your application is performing. While performance monitoring just shows you what is going on with your application, performance management is more active. Instead of just helping identify problems, application performance management sets out to solve issues as well.

Gartner Research determined three essential components of monitoring app performance:

1. End-user experience monitoring (EUEM)
2. Application discovery, tracing, and diagnostics (ADTD)
3. Application analytics (AA)

Application performance management looks at the whole picture. By knowing what infrastructure resources your app is using and how and where it was deployed, you can make much more informed decisions when it comes to performance. This also works best when you have more than one app deployed on the same infrastructure. The data collected includes the following:

• Status and health of the application.
• Dependency maps of the app and the underlying infrastructure.
• Performance metrics for the application.

For more information about how management and monitoring overlap, and the major differences between them, check out Mobile APM: App Performance Monitoring, Management, or Both?

Why do you need Application Performance Management for your mobile app?

App performance and stability directly affect user satisfaction and experience, which in turn affect key business metrics like retention, usage, and revenue. Users won’t be afraid to let you know what’s wrong with your app and give you a one-star rating. And waiting for users to tell you what’s wrong can be very costly. Often, user feedback can be very vague, so you need more data and context in order to diagnose and fix problems. Common user issues include crashes, slow screen transitions, slow network calls, and UI hangs. An app performance monitoring (APM) tool helps you take a proactive approach to dealing with performance issues in your application.

By continuously tracking app performance metrics, you will be able to make targeted speed enhancements and improve your app quality before you hear negative user reviews.

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Mobile app performance essentials

• App launch: The first thing your users encounter. App launch monitoring lets you see how long users are waiting until your app loads and is responsive. Shaping users’ first impressions is key to providing them with a high-quality experience.
• UI hangs: If your app isn’t responding in time, it creates a frustrating user experience. Users have been conditioned to expect mobile apps to be quick and accessible. If they experience a UI hang, it can hurt their perception of your app and brand.
• Network performance: While it is important to monitor service-side network performance, it doesn’t represent the whole story. Tracking response times and errors from your users’ standpoint is key to understanding your end-user experience.
• App traces: One of the essential features in an APM tool is the ability to define custom traces to monitor how long any client-side logic is taking to complete. The ability to track specific app traces will allow you to identify the root cause of problems faster.
• Apdex scores: This single metric at the app level allows you to understand how your app is performing overall. You can quickly see how many users are having a crashing, frustrating, or tolerable experience. With Instabug APM, you also get Apdex scores for more granular components like specific traces.

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Using an App Performance Monitoring tool for your mobile app

Instrumenting your app with an App Performance Monitoring tool will help you stay on top of how your app is doing in the wild and act proactively to find problem areas in your app’s performance. Instabug App Performance Monitoring helps you track key metrics to improve your app’s performance, including Apdex scores, UI hangs, network timeouts and issues, slow launches, tracking custom traces, and more.

For the best results, use Instabug's APM, Crash Reporting, and Bug Reporting together to have a complete picture of your app's quality, performance, and stability. Each tool is essential on its own, and when combined, the sum is even greater than its parts and you'll have all the data and information you need at your fingertips to deliver the fastest and most reliable experience for your users, and outperform your competition.