Kai Xin Tai

From gaming and social media to e-commerce and travel, mobile is reshaping the way businesses operate and engage with their customers. In an increasingly competitive market, ensuring your mobile applications stay highly performant and resilient will be critical in differentiating yourself from the crowd as well as avoiding uninstalls and poor app reviews. But with your applications running on devices at the edge, users might be facing long screen load times and application crashes for a whole range of reasons—from frontend bugs to network connectivity issues—that are hidden from your view.

To help mobile developers deliver a seamless user experience, we’re pleased to announce the release of Datadog Mobile Real User Monitoring. By connecting client-side and server-side metrics, traces, and logs, Mobile RUM gives you full visibility into the performance of your mobile applications. In this post, we’ll show you how you can use Mobile RUM to:

• Improve the performance of your mobile application
• Effectively troubleshoot errors and crashes
• Understand how your users interact with your application

Improve the performance of your mobile application

Datadog Mobile RUM comes with out-of-the-box dashboards that display key performance metrics, errors, and resources, giving you real-time insights into the health of your mobile application in production. At a glance, you’ll see, for instance, how long your screens are taking to load, which screens are returning the most errors, and which resources are most requested. These dashboards allow you to proactively discover issues and areas for optimization so that you’re always delivering the best possible end-user experience. In addition, you can customize them to include metrics that are unique to your business (e.g., revenue, purchases, registrations) to give stakeholders across your organization a better understanding of how application performance impacts your business objectives.

If you see an anomalous spike in a metric—for instance, if your login screen is suddenly returning a large number of errors, or the image resource for your top-selling product is taking twice as long as usual to load—you can dive into individual user sessions to investigate. With the RUM Explorer, you can slice and dice your data across any dimension (e.g., geography, OS version, device) to better understand how specific customer segments are experiencing your application. You can also add custom attributes to your sessions (e.g., email address, organization ID, product SKU) that would be helpful for triaging issues or determining the priority of fixes.

Clicking on a view reveals a waterfall visualization of the time taken for the selected screen to fully load.

Effectively troubleshoot application crashes and errors

Application crashes and errors are major causes of app uninstalls, so it’s critical that you’re able to properly detect and diagnose them. In Datadog, you can set up automated alerts for crashes and errors so that when they trigger, your on-call team can immediately begin troubleshooting to minimize service degradation.

Datadog stitches together client-side and server-side metrics, traces, and logs, giving you an end-to-end view of your application’s performance. With Datadog APM integrated with Mobile RUM, you can inspect individual traces associated with a view in detailed flame graphs that visualize the execution of requests. And if a request resulted in an error, you can easily pinpoint the problematic service and see all the calls leading up to that error. You can also correlate request traces with runtime metrics, logs, and other monitoring data to further investigate and troubleshoot the issue at hand. Mobile RUM gives you all the context you need to identify if the root cause of an issue is related to your code, a third-party API, a backend service, or the network.

Therefore, if a customer opens a support case, you can retrace their entire journey in a matter of minutes to understand where—and why—they encountered a problem, reducing your MTTR and improving your overall customer experience.

Understand how your users interact with your mobile application

Knowing how users engage with your application can help you make better decisions around performance and design optimizations. Mobile RUM collects analytics such as user geography, most visited screens, and most used OS versions. In addition, Mobile RUM automatically collects user actions such as taps, swipes, and scrolls, helping you understand how your users are interacting with individual screens. You can also configure RUM to capture custom user actions so that you can track, for instance, when a user makes a purchase, adds something to their cart, reads an article, or bookmarks an item. Once you have a better idea of how your users are behaving, you can prioritize the engineering work—whether it’s a bug fix or a UI redesign—that will result in the largest user experience improvement.

Deploy mobile applications with confidence

Datadog Mobile RUM provides end-to-end visibility into the health of your mobile applications in production—from the application code that runs locally on the device all the way to its interactions with server-side applications and the network. If you’re an existing Datadog user, you can start using Mobile RUM now to monitor your native Android and iOS applications, as well as cross-platform applications built via React Native. Otherwise, get started with our 14-day free trial today.