What Is Mobile Application Performance Monitoring

With the abundance of mobile apps available, especially the number of apps that claim to perform the same function, users are more sensitive to app quality as a differentiator when deciding which app to use. When users are selecting between five apps that all do the same thing, they probably won’t choose to use the apps that crash, are slow, and are not regularly updated with bug fixes and performance improvements. Mobile Application Performance Monitoring (APM) helps you stay on top of your app’s performance and improve it to deliver the best experience for your users.

What is mobile Application Performance Monitoring (APM)?

At its core, mobile Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is the monitoring and sometimes management of key app performance indicators. The idea is to help easily diagnose and assess different problems in relation to how an app is performing. In an article back in 2012, Larry Dragich described APM as “The translation of IT metrics into business meaning (value)”.

Specifically, APM tools help monitor the end-user experience. This includes metrics like how fast the application opens and how long it takes requests to execute.

Why do you need APM for your mobile app?

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.

It’s important to have a mechanism for users to give you feedback. First, offering a direct channel where you can collect private comments will prevent users from posting their complaints on the app stores. Second, you’ll often discover problems from these bug reports that don’t show up in other places. Third, a robust bug reporting tool like Instabug will provide you with comprehensive data to help you quickly diagnose and fix problems.

But waiting for users to tell you what’s wrong can be very costly, especially since user feedback can be vague. So while bug reporting is essential, the best practice is to have an APM tool alongside your bug and crash reporting tools. An APM tool will alert you about things like slow screen transitions, slow network calls, and UI hangs that also negatively impact your end users’ experience. With an APM tool like Instabug’s, you can take a proactive approach to discover and fix performance issues in your application before these problems become bug reports.

The best way to use APM is not to work backwards and fix issues that arise late; ideally you’ll be working forwards to constantly monitor and continuously improve your app’s performance. Instabug’s triple threat of APM, Crash Reporting, and Bug Reporting tools will empower you to optimize your app’s performance and deliver the high quality experience your users expect and deserve.

Application Performance Monitoring components

According to Gartner Research there are three essential components of APM, each with their own set of key metrics.

End-user experience monitoring: tracks how your mobile app is behaving from users’ perspective. This looks into aspects such as load times, app slowness, or any errors.

Application discovery, tracing, and diagnostics: assesses how the different components of your app are behaving from a diagnostic perspective. Determining whether particular logic is performing as desired is important to understand how your app is performing overall.

Application analytics: raw data that you can analyze, spot trends, and learn insights to help inform decision making.

Using a mobile App Performance Monitoring tool

Instrumenting your app with an APM 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.