Today, many businesses rely heavily on software application solutions to execute most of their functions and processes. Besides, entrepreneurs are facing stiff competition with many organizations striving to deliver excellent customer experience. Whether it is payment solutions, creating a productive working environment, or integrating reliable communication channels, among other core functions in an organization, modern apps help organizations process all these tasks.

But then, building an app is one thing. However, ensuring the app delivers exceptional services and helps organizations meet their objectives and vision is another thing, as the app can crash at any time. Still, hackers can gain unwanted access to the app and exploit most of the app’s features and functionalities. For these reasons, organizations ought to put in place measures to monitor the viability of the app.

This guide explores all the insights you need to know about app monitoring.

What is app monitoring?

App monitoring is simply the process of reviewing the app in terms of its functionality, performance, user experience, and availability. The stable app should function seamlessly with a great user experience.

Importance of app monitoring

So, why should your organization embrace the art or process of monitoring an app? Below are the top reasons for monitoring an app:

• To improve user experience

App monitoring ensures that digital platforms, websites, and applications are easily accessible, engaging, and user-friendly. Below are ways through which monitoring an app enhances a better user experience:

• Steady performance – app monitoring ensures the app is in a stable condition throughout. Users can access it at any given time, perform actions, and navigate through it with ease. When an app performs seamlessly, users gain trust and develop loyalty, which enhances the overall business growth.
• User Retention – when users are contented with an app, they will continue coming back for the same or more services. This increases revenue generation.
• Seamless process of handling issues – should any issues arise that affect the app’s performance, the monitoring tools play a big role in detecting such issues in a timely manner and resolving them promptly, ensuring user experience engagement isn’t interrupted.
• Eliminating frustration – with app monitoring tools, there are reduced or no errors when users are performing specific actions. This eliminates frustration, thus enhancing the overall user experience.

• To upgrade the app’s security

Online apps are prone to different forms of threats, and if not detected in a timely manner, they can pose extreme damage and loss of valuable data and resources. App monitoring tools play a big role in identifying potential loopholes that could cause security concerns and mitigating such risks in a timely manner.

In most cases, online payment methods are prone to extreme risks. An app management tool responsible for enhancing the security of the app can analyze data and identify unusual behaviors, such as abnormal transactions and several access attempts. It then triggers immediate alerts and devises procedures to prevent such unethical activities.

Below are ways through which app monitoring upgrades the overall security of an app:

• Regulatory Compliance – creating a secure platform that follows industry-specific laws and guidelines. This helps businesses evade penalties, which can be financially draining.
• Sensitive data protection – The app monitoring process plays a big role in identifying and addressing potential loopholes that can leak user’s sensitive data and business details.
• Data Integrity – in some apps, data integrity is inevitable. Some app monitoring tools are tailored specifically to monitor and protect data against corruption or malicious exploitation.

• Improving the performance of an app

A well-performing app is measured in terms of efficiency, speed, and responsiveness. A page shouldn’t take forever to load, and neither should a user find it hard to navigate through an app.

Below are some of the ways through which app monitoring enhances the app’s performance:

• Competitive advantages – a speedy performing app with a seamless navigation process attracts a large user base. Once a user finds such a seamless app, they are likely to maintain it for the longest time. A higher user-retention rate enables the business owner to enjoy a competitive advantage, thus growing the business significantly.
• Efficiency – Well-maintained apps perform incredibly, thus maximizing resource utilization and cutting down on operational costs.
• User satisfaction – user satisfaction is key whenever they are using any app. App monitoring ensures the app is faster and highly responsive, thus ensuring all users are satisfied.
• Data Analysis – app monitoring has the power to dig deep into the app’s activities and provide insightful data that help organizations make valuable decisions.

• To detect & resolve issues on time

App monitoring helps the teams to notice potential issues with an app and create a solution in real time.

Some core benefits of detecting and resolving issues in a timely manner include the following:

• Competitive advantage – Again, by identifying and resolving issues faster, app monitoring enables business owners to attract and retain a larger user base, thus gaining a competitive advantage.
• Reducing or eliminating downtime – through app monitoring, businesses can identify issues that could cause an app to crash or load slowly and resolve these issues in a timely manner.
• Brand protection – app monitoring streamlines the processes and enhances the security of the app’s functionality and features. This plays a crucial role in protecting the business’s reputation.
• Better user experience – streamlines processes of identifying and resolving issues and ensures customers as satisfied with the actions they perform.
• Seamless operations – by detecting and resolving issues in a timely manner, app monitoring helps lower operational costs and make troubleshooting of issues a simple task.

• To minimize operational expenses

Finally, app monitoring helps organizations cut expenses while maximizing profits, which is a major objective of most business establishments.

Here is how app monitoring helps reduce operational expenses:

Preventive Maintenance – app monitoring helps in detecting and resolving issues earl enough. If these issues could escalate, it could be costly & require a lot of effort to fix the issues.

Optimizing resources – app monitoring gives valuable insights into resource usage, thus giving an organization a seamless way of allocating resources to increase productivity. Efficient resource utilization minimizes wastage and overall costs of operations.

Better scalability – since app monitoring enhances better allocation of resources, it enhances business scalability which cuts down on unnecessary expenses while promoting business growth.

Reduced downtime – app monitoring is the best when it comes to detecting and resolving issues in a timely manner. This helps prevent operation standstills and service interruptions, thus enhancing productivity in a business environment.

Better user experience – when users enjoy a seamless experience, they are likely to use the app and overall services for the longest, thus higher user retention. In the end, a higher user retention rate reduces marketing and advertising costs.

Tools and software solutions for app monitoring

App monitoring tools are software solutions created to simplify the process of monitoring and managing the overall functionality and performance of an app. These tools and software solutions are accurate and provide real-time data that helps in evaluating the app’s performance, identifying issues, and determining the causes to implement viable solutions.

What’s more, these tools help in creating timely alerts, reporting, and connecting with other systems to enhance the status of an app. As a result, the teams can easily understand the nature of existing issues, implement solutions, and make viable decisions for the future performance of an app.

Using tools and software solutions when monitoring an app is advantageous in the following ways:

• Effective troubleshooting

App monitoring tools are effective and reliable when troubleshooting issues. They deliver in-depth insights into all the processes within an app including user experience, transaction processes, error logs, and overall performance of an app. The insights gathered help experts analyze the root cause of arising issues in a faster and more seamless manner without having to actualize the processes manually.

Some app monitoring tools perform even better by simplifying complex data, enabling experts to review anomalies, patterns, and trends in a quick and efficient manner to make viable decisions.

• Timely issue resolution

App monitoring tools have the power to identify issues in a timely manner and then alert the teams before such issues go out of hand. This helps the teams devise a viable solution and resolve the issues before they get out of hand. This ensures services remain uninterrupted throughout, thus enhancing business continuity.

Apart from identifying and resolving current issues, app monitoring tools also dig deep into future trends and patterns, enabling the teams to plan for software or app updates, put in place preventive maintenance procedures, and act on infrastructure changes.

• Preventing deployment issues

When releasing and updating new features and functionalities, app monitoring tools offer procedures for pre-deployment checks and overall performance checking to ensure new changes made to the app do not affect overall performance and business productivity.

CI-CD – continuous integration and continuous delivery procedures, can therefore introduce app monitoring tools to automate the processes, ensuring all releases meet the set criteria and standards.

While these measures eliminate deployment issues, they also accelerate faster releases and updates, thus enabling establishments to grow faster.

• Better performance & availability

App monitoring tools keep track of the app’s status throughout, thus helping the teams identify areas with issues that could affect the app’s performance, user experience, or downtime. As a result, the teams act upon the alerts, ensuring the stability of the app.

Above all, app monitoring tools help the teams collect valuable data. They can then use this data to plan on how to improve the overall status of an app.

Types of app monitoring tools

An app has different functionalities. As a result, there are tools specialized in monitoring specific functionalities and actions within an app. Below are the common categories of app monitoring tools:

• Error tracking and management Tools

These tools are responsible for identifying, sorting, and drawing viable solutions when resolving issues within an app. They can a wide range or errors and provide detailed analysis into the process of troubleshooting issues in a timely manner.

Again, error tracking tools for app monitoring help the teams identify and prioritize issues based on their impact and frequency, thus helping the teams resolve the most urgent issues.

Such tools are best when integrated with development processes to enable the development teams to track and resolve errors before reaching the final development stages, which enhances the app’s quality and overall performance.

• Real-time monitoring tools

These are app monitoring tools that specialize in delivering immediate analysis of the overall status of an app. They track the system’s patterns and core metrics which help the teams identify and act on arising issues in a timely manner.

As a result, real-time responsiveness ensures the app’s availability and that there is no interruption in business processes. These tools are valuable in microservices architecture or cloud-based services where changes can happen rapidly.

Real-time monitoring tools have customizable dashboards with timely alerts, which keeps the teams on their toes with the rapid changes in an app. These tools can track any activity, be it resource utilization, API calls, or even transaction processes, and deliver real-time valuable insights.

• Application dependency mapping

App dependency is all about reviewing and interdependencies between an app and its components which include external services, middleware, and databases. The insights collected help the teams evaluate the interactions between the ecosystem of an app and determine which processes require troubleshooting.

Again, should an issue arise, the teams are able to dig deep into the main cause of issues, analyze the impact of changes should one or more components within a system fail, and then streamline the update process to enhance the functionality of the app.

Therefore, dependency mapping tools are integrated into the app monitoring system to deliver a dynamic overview of an app for timely updates and help the teams make data-driven decisions.

• Performance monitoring tools

This set of app monitoring tools helps in reviewing the efficiency and speed of an app to help the teams implement improvement measures.

They narrow down their monitoring metrics and review latency, throughput, and overall response time. This detailed analysis helps in identifying areas that interrupt the overall user experience. What’s more, performance monitoring tools have the power to analyze past data and give the teams valuable insights on matters past performance issues, thus making a valuable decision to optimize and improve an app.

Above all, the performance monitoring tools give a clear overview of places within an app where most time is spent, be it external service calls or database queries. This helps developers determine the areas they should fine-tune and tailor them to meet user needs, thus enhancing the entire app’s efficiency. This also helps businesses beat the competitive market.

• Infrastructure monitoring tools

These tools specialize in delivering accurate insights on the performance and health of network resources and hardware that hold up an app. Infrastructure monitoring tools have the capacity to review network devices, storage systems, databases, and servers, thus giving developers a detailed overview of the whole IT environment.

What’s more, these tools track potential hardware failures, load patterns, and resource utilization to help the teams optimize and configure both physical and virtual resources for the efficiency of an app. This makes it easy for the teams to diagnose issues affecting the app’s performance from the outside of the app. Resolving such issues in a timely manner helps businesses prevent app failure, ensuring an app has the resources required to perform seamlessly.

Below is a summary of must-have app monitoring tools and software solutions for different apps and functionalities:

• Dynatrace for finance apps
• IBM Instana for incident management functionality
• Amazon CloudWatch for AWS
• eG Innovations for Node.js apps
• Site24x7 for educational apps
• Google Cloud Operations for Google Cloud
• Logrocket for ecommerce establishments
• New Relic for tracking errors functionality
• Honeycomb for online gaming
• LogicMonitor for automation functionality
• Veeam ONE for disaster recovery

Factors to consider before choosing app monitoring tools

There are many app monitoring tools in the market that can perform the same functionalities. However, the degree of each app monitoring tool differs to some degree. That is why you will need to consider the factors below before you can select a reliable app monitoring tool.

• Ease of deployment and management

Choose a tool that offers a seamless deployment environment and a tool that is easy to manage. Ideally, a tool that requires manual process execution of a hard-to-set-up tool is likely to drain your efforts besides taking a lot of time and resource-draining.

Go for tools that will give you a seamless integration within your app and the entire ecosystem with less destruction to the business operations.

Don’t forget to review the app’s capabilities on reporting and user interface capabilities. You need a tool with a user-friendly dashboard, giving the teams an easy way when execute some processes of the app monitoring tool.

• Type and complexity of the app

Before you choose an app monitoring tool, ensure the tool understands the nature of your app and the complexity levels.

We have different apps with different monitoring requirements. For instance, enterprise, mobile, or web-based apps are different applications with different functionalities, thus different monitoring requirements.

A complex app with several microservices and integrations, for instance, will require a solid and powerful monitoring tool to track the processes for different functions within an app and deliver valuable insights, guiding the teams on the next actions they should take.

Again, figure out the critical paths of an app, the required technologies, and the architecture of an app that requires immediate monitoring. With this in mind, you can then go for tools that give you deeper insights into reporting and tracing transactions to have a better way of supporting and improving an app.

• Security concerns

Matters of privacy, data protection, and overall security are of great significance when choosing an app monitoring tool. Especially when your app holds confidential and sensitive data, you should go for a tool that aligns with PCI, HIPAA, or GDPR guidelines.

Evaluate if an app has features that secure data when in use and when at rest, such as encryption techniques. Go a step further and evaluate the vendor’s measures and practices they follow when handling security concerns.

Some of the security standards an app monitoring tool should meet include audit logs, access controls, and data retention.

App monitoring best practices

As you monitor your app, the following practices will enable you to create the processes & execute the same processes in a seamless manner.

• Define the objectives

Before you initiate the app monitoring agenda, think of what you want to achieve in the end. Determine the main issues you want to monitor, then set the requirements and procedures you will follow to actualize your objectives.

• Choose the right tool for your application

Depending on the objectives you’ve highlighted, think of the right tools that will help you throughout the process. Evaluate an in-depth analysis of your business processes and make viable decisions on the right tool selection for app monitoring.

• Create alert

Once you set up the app monitoring paths and processes, that is not all. You need to keep checking and reviewing the alerts regularly to act immediately if a need arises App monitoring will only be successful when you stay active, identify arising issues, and implement immediate solutions.

• Respond to Data

In the app monitoring process, data collected is key. Use the insights gathered to make the right decisions that will streamline the functionality of the app up to current and future processes. Always review the reports regularly to collect and respond to the data.

• Optimize continuously

App monitoring isn’t a one-time action. It is a continuous process that ensures the app delivers excellent performance to the users and employees at large.

Keep an eye on anomalies and repetitive patterns as you work on eliminating them completely so that you can focus on emerging issues.

Conclusion

An app plays a big role in ensuring the stability and continuity of a business. By connecting business owners, employees, and customers, an app has many functionalities that require close monitoring to enhance its service delivery.

App monitoring is a simplified process that ensures an app remains in a good state at all times. We’ve talked about the tools that make app monitoring accurate and seamless. However, if you are still having a hard time monitoring and enhancing your app’s performance, Aalpha Information System’s team will be glad to help analyze and update your app to ensure business continuity without any interruptions.

Any queries? Connect with our application development company – Aalpha information systems!