Best Mobile APM Solutions

Below is a list of best practices to follow when monitoring your mobile application:

• Monitor your app’s launch time and resume time: Measure both the launch time and the resume time for an application already running in the background to see how they impact user experience.
  
  
• Monitor UI response time: Measure UI response time the way it's experienced by users using different platforms and operating systems. It is important to focus on issues that affect the most users and have the highest business impact.
  
  
• Monitor errors and crashes: Crashes impact your organization’s business. Log the user actions and HTTP errors that cause errors and the number of affected users.

Here are several tips for improving the performance of your mobile app:

• Load APIs from a CDN: Using a content delivery network (CDN) accelerates the loading of APIs. A CDN uses servers throughout the world to speed up API interaction. By using an edge server that is located close to the user, payload, latency, size, and round-trip time is reduced.
  
  
• Optimize application images: Compress and cache images to reduce load time. Compressing images reduces their size and allows you to quickly load images on your app, sparing the extra bandwidth that would be required to show the originally sized image. Caching downloaded images from the network to the device’s memory speeds up application load time, since the mobile app will no longer be required to load them from the external network each time, but rather from its own internal memory.
  

• Load data as you use it: Break down your application’s data into easily retrievable information and load only partial data when the application is launched. When preloading or pre-fetching data, the important information loads before the other assets on the app.

Mobile APM software fills the need for end-to-end visibility into production mobile apps. It delivers device analytics, crash reporting, and network requests. These features help companies isolate and trace issues to their source - whether it’s the application code, network, server, or device.

When choosing a mobile APM solution, here are some features to look out for:

• Application performance monitoring: Real-time monitoring of all end-user experiences and interactions. This includes applications, networks, and the entire cloud ecosystem.
  
  
• Analytics: Understand the behavioral patterns of an application’s users and proactively detect mobile app incidents by severity, affected users, and geography, to prioritize response.
  
  
• Device performance monitoring (DPM): Gain insights into performance and health of mobile devices and automatically resolve issues that arise.
  
  
• Logging and reporting: Filter crashes with analytics based on app version, OS version, device type, and more to immediately reproduce crashes and user actions.
  
  
• Benchmarking: Compare an organization's digital experience to others in the market by leveraging benchmark data from millions of devices.

Mobile APM offers real-time insights into app performance by tracking user experience, monitoring crashes, and analyzing network requests. By identifying slow transactions and locating bottlenecks, you can make informed decisions to optimize code and resources, ensuring a smoother experience for your users. Continuous monitoring helps maintain performance even after updates, boosting user satisfaction.

When using Mobile APM, focus on metrics such as app load time, error rates, transaction traces, and network latency. These metrics provide a detailed view of your app's health and user experience. Monitoring battery consumption is also crucial as it impacts user satisfaction. Setting up alerts for critical metrics helps you address potential issues before they affect users.

Mobile APM tools collect detailed crash reports, including stack traces and environmental data, enabling you to diagnose and fix issues swiftly. By understanding the context around each crash, you can prioritize fixes based on impact and frequency. Stay ahead by identifying trends over time, which helps in maintaining a reliable app and improving user retention.

Real-time monitoring allows you to detect and resolve performance issues promptly, keeping your app running smoothly. You can quickly identify spikes in response times and unusual error rates, enabling swift corrective actions. This proactive approach minimizes downtime and enhances user trust, leading to increased engagement and retention.

Mobile APM provides detailed insights into resource consumption such as CPU and memory usage. By examining these data points, you can pinpoint inefficient code or processes that drain resources. This information allows you to optimize your app to run efficiently across different devices, enhancing performance and extending battery life, which improves overall user satisfaction.