How to choose the best performance monitoring tool

What is performance monitoring?

These are a group/category of tools that enable you see If there is anything wrong with any of your digital experiences or product. With performance monitoring, you can soot issues faster and they notify you when there are problems so you can resolve them faster.

Why you need performance monitoring. 

Being able to see into your apps is key for protecting your business and creating an amazing user experience for your customers. If you are unable to see into your app properly your customers maybe be going though challenges using your platform which would cost you revenue without your knowledge. 

The cost of customer acquisition on mobile is already quite high and throwing this into the mix would mean you lose more when your customers have a negative customer experience. You could be facing negative reviews, or churn which drives customers away. If you can see the problem, then you can fix it using the correct tools to have scalable visibility. In the past, developers would rely on analytics data to get real time visibility but thanks to the developing complex app landscape, developers now see that there is a need for a specialized monitoring tool. 

What to consider when choosing a performance monitoring tool

As with most tools, there are a number of options of performance monitoring tools available and it can be daunting having to choose the right one out of them all. There are two categories you can choose from using the tips we’ll share on how to identify which one is best for your needs.

Before choosing a tool, ask yourself the following question, 

“do you need error tracking or performance monitoring”

Error tracking tools show you user-facing errors that make your app hard to use and report them for later inspection and they should stand as your first line of defense. Error tracking tools also show you how often specific errors happen and which errors are occurring so you can understand why the happen by surfacing trends and de-obfuscating stack traces to enable you fix a specific bug.

 Not all issues get to the “error” level like a code that slows down how fast a page loads on cellular networks. This doesn’t make your app impossible to use nut it makes it frustratingly slow which can make users sign out from your app. 

“do you want a focused best in class tool or a tool that does it all” 

Some tools are fully invested in one area so they are great at delivering that however if you use multiple focused tool then you may find yourself facing a SDK bloat problem. A tool that does it all might be better for your business if you use all its features. Its integration between different offerings and the tool making your app smaller will combine to help it give you more value. 

Trends impacting the performance monitoring space

Some performance monitoring tools are getting absorbed by bigger software solutions and integrated into their functionalities to provide a single solution.

The major trend at customer levels is that customer want to treat this source of data like any other that is, they want to join other sources of customer data to their application monitoring data so they can see how errors affect user experience. 

Being able to understand when, for whom and how your apps crash will allow you to make faster bug fixes that would’ve been hard to spot on your own.