The Importance of Synthetic Monitoring for Mobile Apps
The usage of mobile apps has exploded, and given the global nature of most user bases of any mobile app, there is increasingly little-to-no downtime. At any given point, your mobile app is being used by hundreds or thousands or more users who expect rich, robust functionality. Companies literally cannot afford to deliver a subpar mobile app experience.
That’s where 24/7 synthetic monitoring for mobile applications comes in. With AlertSite’s newest integration to BitBar’s real device cloud for mobile app testing – part of SmartBear’s suite of award-winning software testing products – devops and QA teams can finally implement synthetic monitoring to their mobile app testing process.
But what exactly can an early warning system like AlertSite do to ensure the best user experience for your users? Here are X benefits of how synthetic monitoring can take your mobile app testing and performance process to the next level.
1. Find and fix issues before your users report them with Alerting
It’s great when mobile developers can quickly fix and address issues that are reported to them by users, but imagine being able to take a proactive approach and locate those bugs before your user base does? Synthetic monitoring helps emulate user interactions on your mobile applications so you can get enough bandwidth to identify the problem, engage subject matter experts, and fix the issues before they impact end users. Ensure that key opps, devs, QA and management resources know about issues as they happen in real-time.
2. Monitor complex transactions and business processes
Mobile apps are becoming increasingly complex, and used for all manner of business transactions. Synthetic monitoring allows you to emulate business processes or transactions such as logging in, adding items to cart and checking out from different geographies. You can monitor their performance and compare stats between different geographies or operating systems to formulate the right performance improvement plans.
3. Hold 3rd party vendors and SLAs accountable
To provide rich customer experiences, mobile applications are increasingly dependent on third-party integrations and components. These components help contribute to the overall robust performance of your app, but they also represent separate links on the overall chain that makes up your mobile app, and one weak link can threaten the whole chain. You might have less control over third-party integrations, but with synthetic monitoring you can easily monitor and hold third-party providers and their SLAs accountable.
4. Make sure application updates function as intended
Mobile apps receive constant feature updates these days. Each update you push out is a potentially precarious situation that if not handled correctly, could lead to a host of frustrated users. Synthetic monitoring is a great way to test out application updates before you release them en masse into the wild.
5. Visualize and benchmark all your testing and performance metrics
Finally, as a devops engineer, imagine how helpful it would be to have all your testing, monitoring and performance benchmarks and metrics on one reporting dashboard? Synthetic monitoring will deliver better data to give your team a more holistic view of the automated tests you schedule to run on your mobile applications.
Bringing 24/7 synthetic monitoring from AlertSite to mobile application testing with BitBar is a great opportunity for SmartBear users to further improve the performance of their mobile apps. Don’t take our word for it; sign up for our Free Trial to take it for a test drive yourself!
Author: Gareth Goh
This post was originally published in https://bitbar.com/blog/the-importance-of-synthetic-monitoring-for-mobile-apps/
