How's your app performing? Fathom does a deep dive
Connecting state and local government leaders
Crittercism's Fathom Mobile Command Center offers a way for agencies to track the performance of increasingly complex mobile applications.
Agencies are increasingly relying on mobile apps to accomplish their missions, and most are striving to comply with the Obama administration's directive to create their own. But once an app is working on an agency network or even in the cloud, it's difficult to tell if it's performing optimally or why it may not be running at peak efficiency.
Crittercism is trying to fix that with the release of the Fathom Mobile Command Center, a new platform that provides status monitoring specifically for apps. Fathom watches app performance and reports on how third-party services and network conditions are affecting apps running on iOS or Android platforms.
The Fathom Mobile Command Center is based on five main pillars. The first is Cloud Services, which provides visibility into third-party services and APIs that interact with mobile apps so IT operations and engineering teams can understand issues and edge cases.
Network Management is also an important component to app management. Fathom provides visibility into server-side issues that can lead to app-delays, including latency and throughput.
To help determine if any problems are related to the app itself, the data it's collecting or even if there is a platform-specific issue, Diagnostic Drilldown allows teams to tie diagnostic data back to an app’s network data. This helps isolate issues by device, carrier, OS and network type -- such as Wi-Fi or cellular. Additionally, teams can even filter app network data to see where in the chain problems are happening.
To repeat and test errors, Network Breadcrumbs gives visibility into end-user activity and a diagnostic breakdown to isolate performance issues. Teams can then recreate performance issues with user traces that show both user behavior as well as an app’s interactions with its network.
Finally, Endpoint Analysis allows teams to track down misbehaving API endpoints as well as analyze metrics such as latency, request/data volume and response codes.
"Five years ago even a simple mobile strategy put you ahead of the curve in a lot of industries," said Ben Hoffman, a research analyst at IDC. "But today a winning mobile strategy is oftentimes a fundamental element of success. We’re seeing complex mobile applications being utilized for a huge range of functions across almost every industry we look at. These apps are responsible for critical communications…and the importance of consistent app performance cannot be understated."
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