Mobile Application Performance monitoring in Mint

This talk was given by me at the PhillyCocoa monthly meeting on 08/13/2015. It describes how mobile application performance can be monitored in an iOS app.

1. How do I monitor mobile app performance? Amit Rao Lead Mint iOS developer
2. Measure early, measure often
3. Why mobile APM? • You don’t want to rely on customer reviews to find a problem • You need a better understanding of how users are interacting with your app • The mobile ecosystem is fragmented, and you can’t always troubleshoot across devices, operating systems, and carriers • You need an easier way to figure out how backend services are impacting app performance • You need to know how different versions are performing, and improve them as necessary
4. Analytics v/s Mobile APM
5. Mobile & Web APM
6. Tools/Products • NewRelic • Crittericism • AppDynamics • DynaTrace (Compuware) • many more (but no open source mAPM tools)
7. Mobile APM Features • easy to integrate • cost • end to end monitoring • custom event monitoring • alerting • common tool for iOS and android • visualization and reports • crash reporting
8. Why Mint chose NewRelic • iOS and android SDK was easy to integrate • basic performance monitoring out of the box without manual instrumentation • easy to use web portal • alerting mechanism for engineering ops • support for error monitoring and custom instrumentation • competitive cost and enterprise licensing • common APM solution across mobile, web and platform
9. NewRelic cons • performance data is hosted in NewRelic cloud and data can only be queried using NewRelic Insights which is expensive. • support for REST apis to export performance data into your own data warehouse but apis expose only a sub-set of performance data • For custom errors only absolute error counts can be monitored and no support for custom error rates (failures/attempts).
10. Out-of-the-box monitoring
11. Custom monitoring • Custom interactions and method tracing • Custom metrics • Track custom network requests
12. Mint iOS error monitoring • Login • Add Financial Institution (FI) • Data Refresh (Pull to refresh) • Re-categorization
13. Mint iOS latency monitoring • Display latencies of top views in the app • Login latency • Add FI latency • Pull to refresh latency • App Launch latency
14. Demo
15. Conclusions • mobile APM is important • NewRelic and Crittercism seem to be best-in- class solutions • If you need access to performance data consider importing the data using their apis into your own data warehouse or database. Useful for building custom dashboards and to save costs.