Organizations across the globe are experiencing MMA.  No, not Mixed Martial Arts - Massive Mobile Access.  Smartphones, tablets, glasses, wristbands and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) are being adopted at an alarming rate.  And that means big trouble if your application server infrastructure isn't prepared to handle the performance spikes created by heavy mobile access. 

Recent end-user research has shown that 89% of tablet and 59% of smartphone expect a website to load in 3 seconds or less. These studies have also shown that 75% of mobile users encounter performance or access problems.  Because of that, mobile APM is becoming an increasingly important practice as organizations realize that keeping mobile users happy is critical to business success. 

But what is mobile APM?  Does it just mean mobile app monitoring on iOS, Android, etc.?  Yes, that's part of it, but as with most web applications, the vast majority of mobile app performance issues, whether they're native apps or mobile web apps, are "interaction" issues, i.e. end-to-end transaction issues that occur somewhere in the multi-tier server infrastructure that the mobile apps access.  A bad app design can create some issues, but they're not the issues that cause IT staffs the most concern.

The majority of mobile app performance issues arise from inadequate server-side scalability exposed by high peaks in mobile application access.  If the server infrastructure doesn't scale, then the interaction between the mobile devices and the servers will suffer.  A list of potential mobile app problems includes:

  • Access Time -page download time
  • Total Elapsed Time - The page download and display resource load time
  • Size - the size each page download
  • Headers - the request and response headers sent and received
  • Redirection - the list of URL redirections
  • Source code - native or XHTML code syntax errors and warnings
  • Content-Device compatibility -page object and device compatibility

If this looks similar to the regular web page issues you're familiar with, it is.  In fact mobile web application monitoring is essentially the same as regular web page monitoring except that it's more critical to consider mobile device display area and resource handling capabilities more extensively, than it is for PC web applications.  Native mobile app monitoring is comparable.

A list of the most common Mobile APM Best Practices that our customers do to manage mobile application performance includes:

  • Pro-actively monitor mobile application access with end-user experience monitoring and end-to-end transaction tracing
  • Record every end-to-end transaction for each mobile user so that they can be reviewed if a problem occurs
  • Optimize server interaction by reducing the number of lengthy server queries
  • Reduce the size of graphic objects by using thumbnails or web content optimization (WCO)
  • Make sure the apps run well on the target devices ( iOS, Android, Win8) using mobile APM agents

The advantage of tracing every mobile user transaction is that it captures the "long tail" of application performance degradation, when it occurs.  End-to-end transaction visibility, by itself, provides you with the "short tail", i.e. the immediate problem, by identifying the performance problem root cause (application method, 3rd party service, etc.).  But, it doesn't provide a rich contextual history for that problem.

Only Big Data APM, which captures every mobile transaction into a big data repository over an extended period of time (weeks/months) has the capability to capture every mobile transaction to correlate all of the associated problems, without impacting application performance.

Typically, performance problems are an accumulation of many small, associated problems instead of one big problem - although big problems do occur.  Finding all of the small, interdependent problems can only be achieved by looking through a complete performance history that includes all transactions.  Only then can you say that you have the complete application performance story.

In essence, finding an application performance problem root cause created by mobile access is important but finding all of the other problems associated with that root cause is critical to ensuring that 1) the problem isn't impacting other mobile users and 2) that you're able to identify all of the ancillary problems created by the root problem and resolve them. 

Only Big Data APM and Big Data Analytics provides the real-time performance you need to proactively ensure that all of your mobile app users are happy with their application performance.

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