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How APM Solutions Are Augmenting Mobile App Development For EMM

Take a look at any “Top Trends for Mobile App Development” list, and you’ll inevitably find the terms Enterprise Mobile Management (EMM) and Application Performance Management (APM) featured there. 

With a significant rise in the use of mobile apps for boosting workforce productivity along with customer satisfaction, the EMM market is witnessing a steadfast growth, fuelled further by emerging mobility trends like Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), Corporate Owned Personally Enabled (COPE), and Choose Your Own Device (CYOD).

But, how does APM fit into this picture? Let’s find out.

What is EMM?

The fundamental element of enterprise mobility operations, Mobile Device Management (MDM) tools help protect enrolled devices and their data, within a corporate network. Providing an array of administrative controls and security configuration updates to the devices they strengthen their security framework, and also enable seamless data exchange between devices.

With enterprise productivity and operations becoming more app-dependent, the need for managing those apps gave birth to Mobile Application Management (MAM) tools. MAM helps distribute apps and maintain their life cycle with upgrades, new versions, and patches. MAM products also allow different policies like security, provisioning, and configuration in different user groups and individual apps.

Of late, with MDM tools featuring extensive MAM capabilities, the lines have been blurred between MDM and MAM, and they are being packaged together as comprehensive EMM suites.

EMM tools can not only manage the life cycle of mobile apps, but also provision and deploy them to the workforce, providing best-in-class metrics and analytics that certainly go beyond the individual capabilities of MDM and MAM. However, monitoring the actual usage and performance of applications on the end-point devices is a critical capability missing from these solutions.

 

What is APM?

Conducting diagnosis and assessment of any errors hampering an application’s performance, Application Performance Management (APM) solutions have long enabled mobile app testing and QA tools to ensure smooth app performance.

Realizing the need to monitor user experience—as it heavily impacts key business metrics like downloads, usage, retention, and revenue—enterprises have started integrating mobile APM capabilities within EMM solutions.

APM tools provide constant alerts to enterprises regarding issues like slow network call, screen transitions, UI hangs, etc. that have the slightest possibility of hampering the end user’s experience.

Including metrics like speed of opening an application and overall duration for executing requests in an app, APM is gaining traction as an indispensable component of an EMM suite.

 

Top APM Tools That Can Enhance Your EMM Strategy

Instabug’s APM

Deployment of Instabug’s APM tool in your enterprise mobile apps allows you to take a proactive approach towards enhancing app performance and quality by tracking key metrics like Apdex scores, network issues, UI hangs, slow launches, tracking custom traces, etc. These make you aware of any bottleneck situations ahead of time and save your apps from unnecessary crashes. With Instabug’s APM’s features like enhanced monitoring, you can help your app’s performance reach its fullest potential, by allocating and adjusting resources accordingly.

Features:

  • UI Hangs: Easily detecting UI hangs on your user’s app screen
  • App Launch: Enhancing user experience and app responsiveness by monitoring user’s app using activities
  • Network Performance: Tracking network errors experienced by users, and customising thresholds for critical calls
  • Executions Traces: With custom-made thresholds for specific traces, monitoring your client-side logic performance
  • App Apdex: Understanding overall quality of your app and user’s experience

Apache SkyWalking

One of Github’s most popular open-source tools, Apache Skywalking APM has been running under the Apache License 2.0. Initially designed for tracing applications, it works efficiently with cloud-native, microservices, and container-based architectures. As an APM tool Apache Skywalking demonstrates enhanced monitoring and diagnostic capabilities.

Features:

  • Detects slow services and endpoints
  • Supports several programming languages
  • Optimizing performance
  • Analysis of service, service instance, and endpoint metrics
  • Minimal resource consumption
  • Distributed tracing
  • Analysing and mapping topology
  • Custom dashboard

Pinpoint

Pinpoint is intended towards large-scale distributed systems. Written in Java and PHP, this open-source tool is remarkable for enterprise deployment, aiding app developers in the seamless monitoring of Java code. Pinpoint’s tracing technology provides enterprises with detailed analyses of system structures and the interconnectivity of components.

Features:

  • Fast analysis of the network infrastructure and application topology
  • Real-time monitoring of application
  • Code-level visibility in every processes
  • Seamless installation of APM agent without altering any code

JavaMelody

Another tool operating under the Apache Licence 2.0, JavaMelody is an effective and easy-to-use APM tool for monitoring Java and Java EE applications, seamlessly integrating with Jenkins.

Collecting statistics for application logs on app deployment and usage, JavaMelody sheds lights on the areas like memory, CPU, system loads, head dump, thread dump, etc. Upon extensive analysis and interpretation of these data logs, JavaMelody enables enterprises to detect possible errors that might later create performance issues. 

Features:

  • Easy plugins and third-party integrations
  • Reduced consumption of CPU resources
  • Custom PDF report generation
  • Centralized Monitoring Server (CMS)
  • Real-time notifications and alerts
  • Database monitoring
  • Real User Monitoring (RUM)

Stagemonitor

This open-source APM tool is targeted towards performance monitoring of Java-based applications, with built-in clustered application stacks support.

Features:

  • Facility of in-browser widget
  • Utilizes the Kibana dashboard to analyse requests
  • Monitor and gather cluster metrics
  • Supports new plugins creation

Scouter

Scouter’s unique mechanism enables great performance assessment, providing key metrics about users, response times and resources, among others.

Metrics:

  • Users
    • Active
    • Inactive
    • Recent
  • Service
  • Transaction process system
  • Response time
  • Application profiles
    • Method profile
    • SQL profile
    • External call profile
  • Resources
    • Memory
    • CPU
    • Network & heap usage
    • Connection pools

Top Trends for Better Enterprise Mobility Adoption

While organizations are witnessing a noticeable transition towards enterprise mobility, many of them are trailing behind in the adoption curve, citing concerns like slow development cycle, security issues and bad end-user experience that impact its ROI.

Emerging trends of employing development frameworks and tailored architectures look to pave the way towards wider adoption of enterprise mobility, keeping user experience and time-to-market challenges at bay.

1. React Native (RN) by Facebook

Facebook’s very own React Native framework, immensely popular for agility and flexibility, has always been the developer’s first choice for creating fast, intuitive, and feature-rich apps. React Native’s modular development architecture is highly adaptable to changes, allowing easy updates while keeping the end-user experience intact. Besides, the framework’s handy Libraries and seamless Third-Party Plugins ensure hassle-free development processes.

2. Xamarin

In terms of overall costs and time, meeting the expectations of multiple mobile platform users in a highly fragmented app market is indeed challenging. With benefits like native UI, native performance, and device-specific features; Xamarin is an open-source platform that furnishes a unified development environment. Xamarin’s code sharing feature, which enables most of the code to be reused, significantly reduces time-to-market.

3. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)

Going beyond the traditional development frameworks, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) offer several advantages, converting web pages and websites into dynamic mobile-apps accessible through browsers. Promising an engaging user experience, unaltered even during poor network conditions, PWAs are proving to be indispensable alternatives to costly native apps, for enterprises yearning round-the-clock mobility without jeopardizing engagement, responsiveness, and security.

Wrapping Up

67% of the global workforce already uses BYOD devices, while 87% depend on their organizations for access to corporate apps and data. With over 10 billion personal devices already being used for work, BYOD market is predicted to be worth about $367 billion by 2022. As enterprise mobility increasingly looks to become the norm, the development of APM-integrated EMM solutions becomes ever so important.

However, navigating the murky waters of EMM solution development and deployment calls for partnerships with expert professionals in the field.

Empowered by years of experience developing robust custom applications, Josh Software, as a leading custom application development company, can help you develop custom enterprise mobility solutions that integrate within your existing infrastructure, while ensuring seamless control and exceptional productivity.

Embrace APM & EMM solutions with Josh Software for exceptional time-to-market and ROI

Reach out to us to learn more!

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