Improve mobile user experience with gapless insight into the health of your app releases

Releases represent significant milestones in the development life cycle of mobile apps. The biggest influencers of overall app health are the releases of new versions. Whether you manage an internal app or a consumer app in the Google Play or iOS App stores, after issuing a release, it’s difficult or even impossible to roll it back once your users have downloaded and installed it.
The Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform comes with integrated mobile app monitoring, which provides comprehensive insights from each user’s mobile device all the way to your app’s back-end services. This allows you to ensure great user experience for your apps and ultimately grow your business. Building on the significant mobile app monitoring value that Dynatrace already provides, we continue to further enhance our mobile app health offering.
Today we’re happy to announce the new Crash analysis page, which helps you focus on individual app versions and react to issues early, before they affect the experience of a larger group of users.

Understand and optimize the health of your app releases

The Dynatrace crash analysis workflow is available to you out of the box. This makes it quick and easy to detect issues, assess their impact, and see how crashes manifest themselves for your end users. Most importantly, the crash analysis workflow makes it easy to find the root causes of detected issues. The best news is, the entire root cause analysis is handled for you automatically by the Dynatrace Davis® AI causation engine.

We’ve learned from conversations with our customers that a flexible workflow that additionally allows for manual investigation of the causes of crashes and shows long-term trends would be valuable. This is why we’ve introduced version cards—see the Crash analysis page with version cards below.

Oversee all your mobile releases at a glance

Assessing the health of a new app version gives you quick insight into whether or not the release has successfully addressed a bug that’s of critical importance to your business or, conversely, has introduced a new bug that might be a serious problem if rolled out to all your users.

The version cards at the top of the Crash analysis page provide an overview of your most recent app versions at a glance. They also act as quick filters that you can use to instantly focus your crash investigation on specific app versions.

Each version card shows the ratio of crashed sessions to total sessions (we know that a ratio of > 1% is uncommon, so we use Crashes per 10,000 sessions as the basis for the ratio).

Why is this relative measure relevant? Releasing a new version initially means low adoption and a low number of user sessions, which results in a low number of associated crashes. So the total number of crashes for the latest app version won’t increase significantly. However, if you look at crashes relative to a fixed number of sessions, it evens out the low absolute usage numbers and immediately surfaces any new unwelcome issues before they affect the majority of your user base. This measure can show you if an issue that dogged an earlier release has been eliminated.

Easily assess crash impact

You might also want to see if there’s a disproportionate number of crash occurrences on a specific device model or operating system version.

Therefore, for selected exceptions, or “crash groups,” we’ve introduced a breakdown of the most important occurrence metadata (shown below). You’ll find this information helpful in finding crashes that are bound to a specific set of conditions.

All this, with zero configuration!

Let’s not overlook the fact that this feature requires no configuration. OneAgent for Mobile automatically detects version information in mobile apps. Dynatrace figures out the most recent app versions and the platform from which each session originates and then displays the most recent versions of your mobile app for the platforms, without any need for fine-tuning.

What’s next

This is a only a small update to our Crash analysis page. You can expect much more as we move ahead with new enhancements that will provide more detail about app versions and impacted users. With all the intelligence provided by Dynatrace, you can spend more time developing great apps for your customers.