2014-10-08

The first iteration of New Relic’s mobile application performance monitoring solution, New Relic Mobile, brought real-time, real-user performance monitoring to native mobile app developers. It has always provided mobile developers with critical insights into the everyday performance issues impacting their users.



Today, we would like to add to our real-time performance data and make it more helpful with the announcement of mobile crash reporting. While most mobile apps will not crash for more than a small percentage of user sessions, crashes represent one of the most extreme forms of poor user experience. They are also the catalyst behind negative reviews and app deletions, and thus are very important to monitor.



New Relic Mobile’s crash reporting is designed to optimize and help prioritize one of the largest bottlenecks in the development lifecycle: the time it takes to resolve unanticipated exceptions. At a glance, developers can get a glimpse into the frequency and volume of crashes reporting in (up to the minute), and the number of unique users being impacted by those crashes.

Email notifications proactively alert developers when a new type of crash is detected. As additional users experience that same crash, the stats keep rolling in. From the crash overview screen, you can quickly prioritize developer time based on which crashes are happening most often and/or impacting the most unique users. Built-in issue tracking integrations allow developers to take action quickly and track the status of each unique crash through to completion.



As crashes are resolved and new versions of a mobile app are shipped, development teams strive to see their crash rate decrease and their resolved rate increase. This simple gut check is an important baseline for how mobile teams are doing from a performance standpoint, week to week.

With the addition of crash reporting, the full picture of all mobile performance issues is now available through a single pane of glass. The vast majority of head-scratching performance issues and crashes that mobile developers troubleshoot trace back to three key categories of impact. New Relic mobile tracks all three of these key performance-impacting categories:

1. Environmental conditions: Details like the user’s OS version, device type, location in the world, or choice in mobile carrier can lead any mobile app down a rabbit hole. There are endless combinations and many frustrating performance issues arise simply from the convergence of a certain subset of these scenarios. With New Relic Mobile, key environmental stats are collected about every user session, so that when performance issues arise, guesswork is not required. This also aids in prioritization, by identifying the most common environmental scenarios to test for, creating an optimal experience within your unique user base.

2. Networking conditions: Communication to and from a mobile app is key to a successful user experience. Things like HTTP errors, network failures, strange or empty response bodies, and throughput all play a role. Unpredictable and unreliable third-party endpoints, especially, can wreak havoc on an app’s performance. New Relic Mobile monitors real-time HTTP requests to various internal and third-party endpoints, and captures errors, responses, and network failures so that mobile developers know exactly when a service is leading to slow or inferior experiences in their apps.

3. User-driven data and decisions: A user’s journey and the decisions they make as they interact with an app have an uncanny ability to uncover flaws. The sequence of screens displayed, buttons pressed, data entered, or even the speed of scrolling can spell trouble for your code. New Relic’s User Interaction Traces can help here by providing instant code-level visibility into how an app is performing throughout all user sessions. With the slowest interactions captured and reported, developers can quickly identify the most offending performance issues, isolate the areas of their code that need to be optimized, and spend time improving things that matter.

The root cause of many tricky mobile performance issues frequently falls into one or more of these key categories of performance impact. When coupled with the fast-paced, ever-changing state of the mobile ecosystem, and the highly competitive app stores, real-time insights into these areas of impact can mean the difference between a quick fix and lost revenue.

Eliminate dark corners in your mobile app performance visibility and take back control. Go ahead and install New Relic Mobile, now with crash reporting! Get started with a free 30-day enterprise trial today.

To learn more about what’s new in New Relic Mobile, follow the documentation links below, or watch this short video:

Getting started (iOS)

Getting started (Android)

New Relic Mobile Crashes dashboard

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