The Case for Mobile Monitoring
June 10, 2013

Eran Kinsbruner
Perfecto

Share this

As the adoption and centrality of mobile business apps continue to grow, so does the need for enterprises and mobile carriers to ensure a flawless user experience.

A report by Compuware highlights the increasingly high expectations that users have for accessing sites on mobile phones and tablets. 57% of surveyed users said that they would not recommend a business that had a bad mobile site. Moreover, 46% would not return to that website and 40% had turned to a competitor’s site after a disappointing experience. Clearly, bad performance is bad for business.

Knowledge Is Power

With an ever-growing diversity of devices and operating systems on the market, you need to understand what's happening on your end users' devices. Your operations team needs real insight into response time and availability. At the same time, it is critical to align KPIs to what mobile users care about most.

The more you know about your end users' experience, the faster you can act to correct potential problems.

How long does it take for the application to load on the device? Can it perform login authentication?

Are there service availability degradations on different networks or particular geographies?

Is the application compliant with new mobile operating systems?

To know the answers to these questions, enterprises and mobile carriers need to implement mobile monitoring solutions that continuously measure native application performance on real devices.

Traditional Web Application Monitoring Tools Are Not Relevant

When it comes to the end user experience, web performance testing is mostly about network traffic, and how a web browser running on the desktop handles situations while the server is being loaded. A web browser is able to leverage the PC's capabilities and resources, most of which are not available on mobile devices.

This is not the case in the mobile world. Not only is the mobile device responsible for handling network traffic, it also must handle application processing and logic, authentication and encryption, native resource utilization (GPS, NFC, camera etc.), and application rendering. In mobile, the end user experience is the sum of all of these components, and it is no better than the weakest link in the entire chain.

Bottom Line: Make Mobile Monitoring Part of Your Mobile ALM Strategy

In today's mobile-centric business environment, there is an increasing need for real device mobile monitoring within an organization's overall mobile quality strategy. Only real device end-user monitoring for the key business transactions on the relevant mobile devices can provide organizations with the real-time insights on how the application behaves, and what end-users are experiencing on a specific device operating system and network.

Real-time mobile monitoring tools can serve as an early warning system to diagnose performance issues by isolating the device, application and network conditions to discover the root cause. Enterprises and mobile carriers should implement dedicated mobile monitoring solutions in order to maximize the user experience and meet business goals.

Eran Kinsbruner is Chief Evangelist at Perfecto
Share this

The Latest

March 28, 2023

This blog presents the case for a radical new approach to basic information technology (IT) education. This conclusion is based on a study of courses and other forms of IT education which purport to cover IT "fundamentals" ...

March 27, 2023

To achieve maximum availability, IT leaders must employ domain-agnostic solutions that identify and escalate issues across all telemetry points. These technologies, which we refer to as Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations, create convergence — in other words, they provide IT and DevOps teams with the full picture of event management and downtime ...

March 23, 2023

APMdigest and leading IT research firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) are partnering to bring you the EMA-APMdigest Podcast, a new podcast focused on the latest technologies impacting IT Operations. In Episode 2 - Part 1 Pete Goldin, Editor and Publisher of APMdigest, discusses Network Observability with Shamus McGillicuddy, Vice President of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA ...

March 22, 2023

CIOs have stepped into the role of digital leader and strategic advisor, according to the 2023 Global CIO Survey from Logicalis ...

March 21, 2023

Synthetic monitoring is crucial to deploy code with confidence as catching bugs with E2E tests on staging is becoming increasingly difficult. It isn't trivial to provide realistic staging systems, especially because today's apps are intertwined with many third-party APIs ...

March 20, 2023

Recent EMA field research found that ServiceOps is either an active effort or a formal initiative in 78% of the organizations represented by a global panel of 400+ IT leaders. It is relatively early but gaining momentum across industries and organizations of all sizes globally ...

March 16, 2023

Managing availability and performance within SAP environments has long been a challenge for IT teams. But as IT environments grow more complex and dynamic, and the speed of innovation in almost every industry continues to accelerate, this situation is becoming a whole lot worse ...

March 15, 2023

Harnessing the power of network-derived intelligence and insights is critical in detecting today's increasingly sophisticated security threats across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure, according to a new research study from IDC ...

March 14, 2023

Recent research suggests that many organizations are paying for more software than they need. If organizations are looking to reduce IT spend, leaders should take a closer look at the tools being offered to employees, as not all software is essential ...

March 13, 2023

Organizations are challenged by tool sprawl and data source overload, according to the Grafana Labs Observability Survey 2023, with 52% of respondents reporting that their companies use 6 or more observability tools, including 11% that use 16 or more.