5 Signs You Have Outgrown Your Mobile Monitoring Solution

Imagine you start a new hobby -- let's say bike riding. You don't want
to invest a lot in a bike because you're not sure that you'll like it.
Luckily, you snag a free bike from a friend -- it's clunky, but the
price is right. You start out with short rides around your neighborhood
and eventually find yourself riding every day, going on longer and
longer rides. Your free, heavy bike is holding you back. Now that you're
cycling more seriously, it's time for a better bike.

Mobile app monitoring is like that. When you first start building a mobile
app, a free tool may be fine for identifying and solving most crashes.
But as your user base grows and you want to improve mobile stability and
performance to gain higher ratings and boost your visibility on app
stores, you need a better tool. Here are some signs that you've outgrown
your mobile monitoring tool:

1.  You don't have enough context to solve crashes fast.

Knowing that crashes and other errors are happening is important, but
without the right context, it's hard to identify the root cause and
solve it fast. You need to collect enough data from user sessions to
resolve issues quickly, including user
metadata
(device type, location, app version), user actions (the steps a user
took that led up to the crash or error),
screenshots,
and view hierarchy. Grouping
errors
is helpful to isolate the issue impact to specific devices or
versions. Stack
traces with
un-minified source code give you insight into the sequence of events
that lead to the bug as well as the line of code where you can find
the bug. If you have two-way integrations with source code management
platforms like GitHub, you can even determine the original owner of
the commit who might know exactly what happened.

Sentry provides deep context into errors and crashes, including
breadcrumbs,
screenshots,
stack traces,
and suspect
commits.
With tags, you can group errors to identify high level trends.

2.  You are wasting time dealing with broken workflows.

If you are building a mobile app solo or with a very small team, you
may not notice minor snags in your workflow. But, as your app grows
and multiple developers are collaborating across teams, inefficiencies
in your workflow can really slow you down. We usually hear about two
types of workflow challenges from users:

• Issue triage and assignment: keeping track of issues to solve and
  owners to solve them

• Tool integration: ensuring critical data flows between key apps and
  services, like Jira and GitHub

Because they are intended for smaller teams, entry level mobile
monitoring solutions lack the workflow tooling that most organizations
need to find and fix bugs, errors, and performance issues smoothly.
Investing in a tool that streamlines your workflows is well worth it
-- the less time your team spends on troubleshooting, the more time
they can spend building.

3. You get so many alerts you've started to tune them out.

To solve a mobile crash, you first need to know that something is
wrong. Well-defined alerts notify you when a crash or performance
issue is affecting enough users to warrant immediate attention. If
your mobile monitoring doesn't provide meaningful and issue-specific
alerts, you and your team won't know which crashes, errors, and issues
really demand your attention and which are just false alarms. Pretty
soon, you'll start ignoring them. And if you're ignoring all your
alerts, it's like you have no alerts at all.

With Sentry, create custom Issue or Metric
alerts using
conditions that matter to your organization -- not just velocity
alerts. Send notifications
to specific devs, teams, or applications when something needs
attention.

4.  You no longer trust the data you're seeing.

Unfortunately, we have heard from many users that entry-level mobile
monitoring tools do not report all crashes or errors. When they
compare crash reports from their monitoring console to the Google Play
Developer or App Store Connect Console, there are often discrepancies
in the results. You can only solve the crashes and errors that you
know about -- if your customers are experiencing issues that go
unreported, it will negatively impact their experience.

5.  Your users are complaining.

This is probably the most important sign that you have outgrown your
mobile monitoring solution. If you aren't able to accurately identify
and quickly solve issues that are affecting the stability and
performance of your mobile application, your customers will get
frustrated, leave bad reviews, and potentially abandon your app
altogether. In most cases, the primary benefit of an entry-level
mobile monitoring solution is that it is no cost. But, when you
consider that 48% of
users
will delete an app after experiencing a single performance issue, and
for every one-second
delay
in screen load times, conversions drop by 7%, a "free" mobile
monitoring solution that indirectly impacts the customer experience
will cost you.

If any of these signs ring true, it's probably time to move on from
your current monitoring solution -- the success of your mobile
application depends on it.

When did you know it was time to upgrade your mobile monitoring
solution? Join our conversation on Discord or learn more about our
mobile monitoring solution.