In mobile, APM has taken on new and critical importance. With mobile apps becoming increasingly vital to a business’ overall performance, it is important to manage 
and improve — not just measure — application performance. Thus the focus and purpose of Mobile Application Performance Management centers on helping companies detect, prioritize, isolate, diagnose, repair, and prevent problems before users or a business are impacted. The goal is to improve customer experience, boost loyalty and increase enterprise efficiency.

When all is said and done, end-user experience with an application is what really matters. Effective mobile application performance management optimizes application availability and response time, ensuring the best user experience.

The following guidelines will arm IT leaders with the necessary steps to finding the right mobile app performance management solution for 100% success.

1. Drill down in the data

Once you pinpoint the cause of a crash, be sure your solution can tie diagnostic data back to your app’s network data, allowing you to isolate issues or track down misbehaving API endpoints. Even better if your solution goes beyond analyzing metrics such as latency, request and data volume, and can filter all of your endpoints grouped by cloud service. That will help you diagnose the errors in detail.

2. Think BIG

Even if you are not a big organization now you should harness a solution that can scale with your business. Solid candidates are ones that have "Mobile First" baked into their corporate DNA and purposely built the capabilities to scale (through a cloud-based infrastructure). These providers are going to be the pros at mobile app management — a position that gives them key insights (drawn from millions of devices and billions of apps) — and makes them a good partner in your wider strategy to make your app succeed.

3. Visibility matters

Monitoring glaring coding mistakes is just as necessary as sorting out smaller edge cases 
to win the battle for users and five-star reviews. Choose a solution that allows you to visualize aggregated data on a dashboard. That’s really the only way to see how people are using your app, account for all variables and explore exactly where errors occur. Even better if the provider has developed an integrated strategy to show you what is actually happening in the field. Access through a single, easy-to-use dashboard is essential to delivering consistent high app performance as part of your mobile app lifecycle.

4. Put business goals first

Obviously a mobile app performance management solution must analyze performance of your mobile sessions. But an effective approach goes an important step further, tying session analysis 
back to your business goals (user retention, completing a level in a game, shopping cart purchase, etc). Most importantly, your solution should provide potential fixes or solutions to performance issues.

Finally, choosing a provider that can go that one step further and sort the crash groups by the number of users affected is a key element. This will allow organizations to focus efforts and resources on fixing the bugs that have impacted the largest number of users.

Jeannie Liou is a Marketing Manager at Crittercism