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.

Some of the benefits of using a mobile APM solution include:

• End-user experience monitoring: Gain visibility into the end user experience of every cloud, SaaS, thick client, or enterprise mobile app in your portfolio, running on any device.
  
  
• Optimal service delivery: Mobile APM solutions provide DevOps with a single pane of glass to ensure the quality and performance for the entire mobile app life cycle. This enables users to proactively detect and analyze mobile app incidents and respond appropriately, compare the performance of mobile apps across locations, carriers, devices, and operating systems, and correlate application performance with that of the underlying network or server.
  
  
• Improved focus on end users: Gain a detailed understanding of the end user. Mobile APM solutions provide a user-centric view that enables enterprises to effectively measure, manage, and improve their mobile services.
  
  
• Better customer service: When a mobile application experiences performance issues or is unavailable, it might be abandoned by customers. Mobile APM solutions provide real-time performance insights and contextual data that allow DevOps to swiftly act when issues arise.
  
  
• Safeguarding business interests: Mobile APM solutions provide business intelligence analytics, which can help companies visualize and understand how mobile application performance issues impact their business goals.

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.