Case Studies Mirego Identifies Real Time API Errors in Native Mobile Apps with New Relic for Mobile Apps

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	Mirego Identifies Real Time API Errors in Native Mobile Apps with New Relic for Mobile Apps

Mirego Identifies Real Time API Errors in Native Mobile Apps with New Relic for Mobile Apps

Technology Category	Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Applicable Industries	Software
Applicable Functions	Product Research & Development Quality Assurance
Use Cases	Real-Time Location System (RTLS) Predictive Maintenance
Services	Software Design & Engineering Services System Integration
Challenge	Understanding issues in a web application may be a challenge, but getting the same understanding from a mobile app is a flat-out guessing game. Just ask Pierre-Luc Simard, CTO at Mirego. “If you’re developing a web app, you can test in every single condition from your computer,” he says. “You can try every version of each browser. You can simulate any kind of network connection. With mobile applications, you can’t do it all. You make your best guess based on the limited evidence at hand, then you release a new version to every single user through the AppStore or Google Play. You can’t release it to a subset of users — it goes out to every single user. When working with the AppStore you may have to wait two weeks for the review, and then, at long last, you find out if you actually fixed the problem. It’s like driving blind, except you don’t know if you’ve wrecked the car until weeks afterward.” In many cases, an issue emerges only after users have complained — which usually means a crop of one-star reviews in the various stores. “It can be very difficult to recover from a lot of bad reviews,” says Simard. “For every one-star review, you need a couple five-star reviews to get back on track. In other words, waiting for users to complain can be a very damaging approach to testing a mobile application.” Read More
About Customer	Mirego is a leading mobile design and development team that helps its clients understand mobility, seize opportunities and reinvent themselves with the help of outstanding mobile applications. Since its founding in 2007, the company has worked with a wide range of clients and has built over 90 smartphones and tablets applications used everyday by millions of people around the world. The company is based in Quebec City, Quebec and has 40 employees. Mirego's stack runs on Rails 3 and is hosted on Amazon Web Services. All client projects are native applications designed for a variety of mobile operating systems, including iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile. Read More
Solution	Simard was already using New Relic to monitor Mirego’s web servers, so he was familiar with the benefits of getting real time, in-depth information on app performance. “New Relic is unique in its intensely data-driven approach to application monitoring,” he says. “We love what it’s done for our web environment. So when we heard about the beta version of New Relic for Mobile Apps, we were very excited to give it a try.” Implementing the mobile version was simple. “You drag and drop a library into your app, and you add one line of code,” says Simard. “It’s a five-minute process, tops. New Relic doesn’t change the way you run your mobile application. You don’t need to alter your network connection, and you don’t have to trigger any special events. You get very good data right away with basically no effort.” With New Relic for Mobile Apps, Simard and his team have access to the same detailed data they find in Real User Monitoring (RUM), but optimized for native mobile apps. “We’ve always loved RUM because it shows us performance data from the individual user’s perspective,” he says. “The mobile version of New Relic offers very similar information at a similarly granular level. We’ve never had that depth of insight into our clients’ mobile apps before.” Read More Log in to view content
Contents

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management

Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics

Applicable Industries

Software

Applicable Functions

Product Research & Development

Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Real-Time Location System (RTLS)

Predictive Maintenance

Services

Software Design & Engineering Services

System Integration

Challenge

Understanding issues in a web application may be a challenge, but getting the same understanding from a mobile app is a flat-out guessing game. Just ask Pierre-Luc Simard, CTO at Mirego. “If you’re developing a web app, you can test in every single condition from your computer,” he says. “You can try every version of each browser. You can simulate any kind of network connection. With mobile applications, you can’t do it all. You make your best guess based on the limited evidence at hand, then you release a new version to every single user through the AppStore or Google Play. You can’t release it to a subset of users — it goes out to every single user. When working with the AppStore you may have to wait two weeks for the review, and then, at long last, you find out if you actually fixed the problem. It’s like driving blind, except you don’t know if you’ve wrecked the car until weeks afterward.” In many cases, an issue emerges only after users have complained — which usually means a crop of one-star reviews in the various stores. “It can be very difficult to recover from a lot of bad reviews,” says Simard. “For every one-star review, you need a couple five-star reviews to get back on track. In other words, waiting for users to complain can be a very damaging approach to testing a mobile application.”

About Customer

Mirego is a leading mobile design and development team that helps its clients understand mobility, seize opportunities and reinvent themselves with the help of outstanding mobile applications. Since its founding in 2007, the company has worked with a wide range of clients and has built over 90 smartphones and tablets applications used everyday by millions of people around the world. The company is based in Quebec City, Quebec and has 40 employees. Mirego's stack runs on Rails 3 and is hosted on Amazon Web Services. All client projects are native applications designed for a variety of mobile operating systems, including iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile.

Solution

Simard was already using New Relic to monitor Mirego’s web servers, so he was familiar with the benefits of getting real time, in-depth information on app performance. “New Relic is unique in its intensely data-driven approach to application monitoring,” he says. “We love what it’s done for our web environment. So when we heard about the beta version of New Relic for Mobile Apps, we were very excited to give it a try.” Implementing the mobile version was simple. “You drag and drop a library into your app, and you add one line of code,” says Simard. “It’s a five-minute process, tops. New Relic doesn’t change the way you run your mobile application. You don’t need to alter your network connection, and you don’t have to trigger any special events. You get very good data right away with basically no effort.” With New Relic for Mobile Apps, Simard and his team have access to the same detailed data they find in Real User Monitoring (RUM), but optimized for native mobile apps. “We’ve always loved RUM because it shows us performance data from the individual user’s perspective,” he says. “The mobile version of New Relic offers very similar information at a similarly granular level. We’ve never had that depth of insight into our clients’ mobile apps before.”

Impact #1	New Relic saves time: on the server side, Mirego reduced its mean time to resolution (MTTR) from 24 hours to 6 hours.
Impact #2	New Relic helps Simard and his team take the guesswork out of diagnostics.
Impact #3	More accurate data means that Mirego’s developers can be more proactive in addressing errors and fixing bugs on clients’ mobile apps.

Impact #1

New Relic saves time: on the server side, Mirego reduced its mean time to resolution (MTTR) from 24 hours to 6 hours.

Impact #2

New Relic helps Simard and his team take the guesswork out of diagnostics.

Impact #3

More accurate data means that Mirego’s developers can be more proactive in addressing errors and fixing bugs on clients’ mobile apps.

Benefit #1	Improved MTTR by 400% reducing the average time from 24 hours to 6 hours for diagnosis and correction
Benefit #2	Troubleshooting API-related errors for native mobile apps has been reduced to minutes instead of days

Benefit #1

Improved MTTR by 400% reducing the average time from 24 hours to 6 hours for diagnosis and correction

Benefit #2

Troubleshooting API-related errors for native mobile apps has been reduced to minutes instead of days

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Overview

Mirego Identifies Real Time API Errors in Native Mobile Apps with New Relic for Mobile Apps

Operational Impact

Quantitative Benefit