6 tools for producing a great mobile app experience

Mobile app performance management (APM) software provides visibility into mobile app performance and helps pinpoint and resolve issues that affect end-user experience. It typically provides crash reporting, network monitoring and user interaction monitoring to keep users active and satisfied with the app.

According to the IT Central Station user community the most important criteria to consider when choosing a mobile APM product are in-depth data visibility, strong monitoring capabilities and advanced trend analysis.

Six of the top mobile APM solutions are New Relic APM, AppDynamics APM, HPE AppPulse Mobile, Dynatrace, Dell Foglight and Aternity, according to online reviews by enterprise users in the IT Central Station community.

But what do enterprise users really think about these tools? Here, users give a shout out for some of their favorite features, but also give the vendors a little tough love.

Editor's note: These reviews of select mobile APM vendors come from the IT Central Station community. They are the opinions of the users and are based on their own experiences.

New Relic APM

Valuable Features

New Relic helped us in realizing that sometimes our online service wasn't as fast and reliable as we expected it to be. With the help of New Relic tools, our organization was able to detect, track and fix errors in our website, so we focused our efforts in these areas.
— Marc P. Technical project lead at a tech services company

The most valuable feature is the transparency into how applications are running. That's huge because we previously didn't have it and we had no idea what was going on. Now, we can see exactly what's going on and are able to understand what code paths are running.
— Kyle B. Lead Developer at a media company

Room for Improvement

One of my issues was with not getting enough insight into errors, as I can only go back seven days. The data collection is not a long-enough period of time if I want to see some trends. If someone is having some errors, I can't get historical insight.
— David S. SQA Manager at a wholesaler/distributor

I wish it had more insight into what might be causing a particular slowness issue. It finds the function, but it would be great to have insight into what's slow.
— SrSoftwareEng508 Senior Software Engineer at a retailer

You can read more New Relic APM reviews on IT Central Station.

AppDynamics APM

Valuable Features

It provides great tools for monitoring and managing all the different environments of development, QA and product [groups] with different needs but from a common interface. And because it's also a SaaS-based application, it can be accessed by all team members from anywhere at any time.
— Utkarsh C. Performance Tester/QA at a tech consulting company

We can evaluate the performance of an application by doing a few clicks and find bottlenecks very easily. We have become more proactive rather than reactive.
— Jose L. Senior Application Support Specialist at a gaming company

Room for Improvement

AppDynamics should try to find some measure of support or functionality for SAP and PeopleSoft environments. Additional support for next-gen mobile platforms also need to be high in the road map prioritizations.
— Sid R. Vice President - Operations & Client Support at a tech services company

AppDynamics should add more features to identify [when] there is some [code] thread waiting for something. We are keenly looking for this feature. Currently only custom exit points can be created for non-instrumented nodes.
— SrSoftwareEng528 Senior Software Engineer at a financial services firm

You can read more AppDynamics APM reviews on IT Central Station.

HPE AppPulse Mobile

Valuable Features

The first thing that really turned me onto AppPulse Mobile was that they had a tag list, which can instantly capture all of the data that end users were creating by interacting with our app, without having to write a single line of code.
— Yan A. Co-Founder and COO at a software R&D company

It took me less than 30 minutes to integrate it, with no additional development needed. As a start-up, that's really important because everyone is doing five jobs.
— Xavier W. CTO at a tech company

Room for Improvement

I would like to see more reporting and analytics. I also want to be able to get notifications when something goes wrong or something unusual occurs.
— Zvi L. CTO at an investment company

I would love if AppPulse delivered more details about my users, for example, age and sex. It could split up the users into categories based on how frequently they use my product.
— Xavier W. CTO at a tech company

You can read more HPE AppPulse Mobile reviews on IT Central Station.

Dynatrace

Valuable Features

The most important features are the ability to see trends in performance and also to aid in diagnosing any performance degradation in the web applications.
— Dan S. Technical Architect at a software R&D company

Dynatrace facilitates great live performance monitoring, allowing us to easily and visually detect problems before they become a large impact issue to the business.
— SysAdmin9707 Systems Administrator III at a retailer

Room for Improvement

Better intelligence in terms of identifying business transactions, would be appreciated. Also useful would be pointers to recurring issues, and automated incident management.
— Praveesh B. Assistant Manager at a tech services company

They need to improve the browser interface. I can't get it to work visually for some of the things I want to do, and that's frustrating.
— WebExAnalyst329 Analyst at a hospitality company

You can read more Dynatrace reviews on IT Central Station.

Dell Foglight

Valuable Features

Having standard monitoring features and a central repository saves us a lot of time and reduces risk of incidents. It replaces a lot of manual tasks and makes it easier for us to be more proactive and to prioritize issues across multiple systems. It also keeps a history which we use for post-incident reviews and performance monitoring.
— Robert S. Database Administrator at a tech services company

The ability to track performance of an application or application suite over time is extremely valuable to our business partners and for our application development team, with near real-time results.
— Josh K. Senior Systems Engineer at a software R&D company

Room for Improvement

It needs a more intuitive way to create and implement custom cartridges to be deployed throughout a federated environment.
— Franco A. Sr. Virtualization Architect / Engineer at a tech company

The upgrade process could use some fine-tuning. I have done an upgrade of the system, as well as added or updated agents, and sometimes that process is a bit cumbersome, and does not go as planned.
— Diran S. PeopleSoft Administrator at a K-12 educational company

You can read more Dell Foglight reviews on IT Central Station.

Aternity (acquired by Riverbed)

Valuable Features

The dashboards of this platform are the most valuable, especially the Desktop Health dashboard. This gives you the ability to see the trend in health of all desktops in a historical view.
— Thomas K. Infrastructure Engineer Specialist at a healthcare company

The most valuable feature for us is trend analysis — such as blue screens, application errors and application crashes. It also gives us the ability to correlate that with different attributes, such as location or the Internet Explorer version or whatever comparisons we'd like to try to make to analyze our environment.
— Phil T. IT Administrator at a financial services firm

Room for Improvement

The dashboards and navigability of the platform could use improvement. It often takes five or six clicks to drill down to exactly what you want to see, but many of our stakeholder groups have refused to use the tool because they perceive it as too cumbersome to get the information they need.
— Jess K. Enterprise Performance Analyst at a petroleum contract drilling company

I'd like to be able to build monitors easier. And they need to make the program less complicated. The documentation could be better. Also, I'd like to be able to download the latest version for testing.
— CST469 CST at a government agency

You can read more Aternity reviews on IT Central Station.

This story, "6 tools for producing a great mobile app experience" was originally published by CIO.