Ensure great customer experience on your mobile app by monitoring key user actions

From their favorite retailer to their favorite restaurant, today’s customers place great value on every interaction they have with a brand. Consequently, each interaction they have with your mobile app is a make-or-break opportunity for your business to drive lasting customer loyalty. But how do you ensure that your mobile app is not only working well, but that your customers are having a great user experience as well? Overall statistics like the number of users, user sessions, or the crash rate definitely are a good starting point. But in most cases, there are certain user actions that help you to measure the success of your app and your business even more precisely.

We address this requirement in Dynatrace by proudly announcing key user actions for mobile app monitoring—a great new feature for you to monitor your most important mobile app KPIs, providing you with a good foundation to drive lasting customer loyalty and grow your business.

Define and monitor up to 500 key user actions and track historic trends

Your mobile apps include user actions like signups, checkouts, and product searches that are particularly important to the success of your digital business. You might find that sometimes your key user actions take longer to execute than others. Or, they might be required to be of shorter-than-average duration.

For instance, consider that you’ve set your global Apdex threshold to 3 seconds. While this threshold might be acceptable for the majority of user actions, it might not be acceptable for a sign-up user action. Alternatively, there could be a search action that’s quite complex and requires longer than the allotted 5 seconds.

Apdex ratings provide quick insight into the user experience provided by your app. With the key user action feature, you can customize the Apdex thresholds for each of these user actions. You can use this feature to monitor key actions with a dedicated dashboard tile and track historic trends.

Your Dynatrace environment allows you to:

• Define up to 500 key user actions
• Mark up to 100 of your user actions as key user actions (per mobile app)

From that point on, Dynatrace starts writing timeseries metrics that can be used for custom charting. You can define individual Apdex thresholds, and modify the anomaly detection settings for any user action.

Easily define key user actions, pin them to your dashboard, and more

You can define a new key user action on the user action details page. Just select Mark as key user action to get started. This gives you the option to:

• Pin a user action tile to the dashboard
• Change the Apdex and anomaly detection configuration
• Remove the action from key user actions

After configuration, you’ll find a new section in the Multidimensional analysis page that holds a list of all key user actions.

Note: Key user actions only show up in this list if the current filters actually include results for your key user actions. If you’d like to see the list of all key user actions that have been configured for this app, you can disable Show active key user actions only at the top of the page.

Monitor what matters by defining individual Apdex thresholds for every key user action

Different user actions also have different performance requirements. This means that a single Apdex threshold across your app won’t satisfy your KPI monitoring needs. Therefore, the best practice is to have a standard threshold set at the app level, but for every key user action, you should define an individual threshold that correlates with your business requirements.

Fine-tune problem detection by setting individual anomaly detection rules for your key user actions

Dynatrace automatically baselines the performance and errors of all your user actions. Once a baseline is violated, Davis® correlates it with other observed events and triggers root cause analysis. You can apply individual anomaly detection settings for your key user actions to fine-tune the problems that Davis detects.

Out-of-the-box metrics and custom charting give you instant insights into key user action performance

Dynatrace provides a number of out-of-the-box metrics for key user actions, including performance, throughput, error rates, and web request counts. You can find these metrics in the Applications > Mobile & custom > Key user actions section.

Summary

Key user actions for mobile apps are a great new feature you can use to monitor your most important mobile app KPIs, providing you with a good foundation for driving lasting customer loyalty and growing your business.