Real User Monitoring for Native Mobile Applications

At some point, your enterprise is going to realize that it has to get serious about improving the performance and quality of your mobile applications. There's a lot of confusion about what's involved in monitoring performance of mobile applications. In many instances, someone in marketing or on the business side desperately wants a consumer-facing app for some new project or initiative for the company brand, be it for a promotional effort or some other type of campaign.

The enterprise IT group doesn't have the internal skills for native mobile application development and mobile apps in general are outside the domain of the traditional IT Ops group and it would take way too long for them to gear up to do it, so the business uses their discretionary, project, or advertising/marketing budget to engage with an agency or a consultancy to build the app in time for the project at hand.

Then, once the app is out in the wild among your customers for its initial purpose, the following process will inevitably happen:

       The desired scope of the application will expand as the company decides they want to use it for other purposes with additional features and functionality beyond the original minimally viable product definition.

       There will also certainly be problems with the app due to unanticipated issues or as a result of bugs and performance problems introduced by new features that got added later like tying the app into the enterprise IT infrastructure for services needed to support the new features.

       Users will be upset by the issues and write scathing reviews in the app stores or on social media, which will give the app poor rankings. They may even delete the app entirely. The company will realize that the poor app experience is hurting the company brand and costing it customers and good will.

       There will be frantic calls that somebody has to DO SOMETHING about it to make it right.

The process for adding monitoring of the performance of mobile application as it is being used by your customers is different due to the level of indirection involved and the lack of direct access to the devices where the application is running.

Since the mobile application is being used directly by your customers on their personal or corporate mobile phones, the mechanism of monitoring the performance of the app "in production" is called Mobile Real-User Monitoring or Mobile RUM.