API monitoring prevents mobile app failures
Mobile app users expect feature-rich, robust functionality at any given time. That’s why providers must take an active approach to identify and fix issues before they impact end users.
There are more than seven billion mobile users globally – constantly checking their social media, messaging each other, and watching entertainment on their mobile apps. With high user expectations, and competition for attention, any downtime or lack of robust functionality may result in lost revenue for providers.
Fixing user-reported bugs can be time-consuming and costly, so it is crucial to have comprehensive functional testing plans in place for released apps. Otherwise your teams are constantly putting out fires to fix them.
Synthetic monitoring
That’s where a synthetic monitoring solution for mobile applications comes in. Synthetic monitoring is an active approach to testing a website or service. It is considered the first line of defense against outages and slowdowns, which most businesses can’t afford to go unmitigated for any length of time.
Here are five areas where synthetic monitoring can help:
1. Finding and fixing issues before your users report them
Most mobile developers can quickly fix and address issues that are reported to them by users. But there’s a much better approach to testing so you can locate those errors before your user base does. Synthetic monitoring empowers you to simulate user interactions on your mobile applications on a set schedule so you can identify the problem and fix issues before they impact end users.
By employing the right types of monitoring — API monitoring , website availability, web performance monitoring, and transaction monitoring — there’s a much higher likelihood that key teams and management will know about issues as they happen in real-time before brand reputation suffers.
2. Emulating the business pathways and processes on user journeys
Mobile apps aren’t just for entertainment or social media management anymore. They are increasingly handling critical business transactions in banking, travel and more. Any slowdown in a workflow can cause noticeable increases in abandonment rates, leading to lost business. Synthetic monitoring allows you to emulate processes and transactions, such as logging in, adding items to cart, and checking out on a regular basis with scheduled tests. Monitoring performance metrics and stats between different geographies, devices, or operating systems is valuable in formulating plans to improve the performance of these critical flows.
3. Ensuring third-party vendors meet SLAs and other service agreements
Third-party vendors like content delivery networks (CDNs) contribute the content for the rich customer experience and robust performance of your app. However, they can also be the source of weak spots, threatening the smooth functionality that makes up your mobile app. One weak link that can be the source of a poor customer experience. While you cannot have complete control over performance levels of third-party integrations, with synthetic monitoring you can spot potential week links, catch issues before your users do, and hold third-party providers accountable to their SLAs.
4. Making sure application updates function as intended
Traditionally teams scheduled periodic releases around their customers’ low usage times. However, mobile apps receive much more frequent feature updates these days. Each update you push out creates a potentially precarious situation that, if not handled correctly, could lead to a host of frustrated users. Synthetic monitoring is ideal for keeping track of your releases as they are pushed out to end users. It catches bugs and other problems before your customers start pointing them out on social media platform.
5. Putting testing and performance metrics into clear perspective
Custom dashboards are personalized compilations of reports containing both graphical and list variations of your monitoring data. They are designed to be fully flexible, so you can quickly add report tiles, pick and choose how you display your uptime and performance monitoring data, and spot trends at a glance. Where can you get all of this and more? Uptrends Synthetic Monitoring. It delivers better data to give your team a more holistic view of the automated tests you run on your mobile applications.
Don’t take our word for it; sign up for our free trial to take it for a test drive yourself!
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