Gartner’s Jonah Kowall covers the state of the Mobile APM market in his latest blog post titled, “Mobile APM, hold on!“
Mobile APM is finally coming of age, current tooling allows for crash management, or synthetic transactions delivered via SaaS models. These are critical in determining application availability, but provide limited data when determining performance. The clear leader of today’s mobile synthetic monitoring is Keynote systems, who’s able to simulate devices, or even test with real devices within their POPs. Compuware’s Gomez offering has some technology emulating and using mobile browsers, along with many other vendors who have various synthetic testing capabilities. The IT Operations team still likes using synthetic monitoring tools, but there is nowhere near the details that the mobile operations teams need. Typically in most organization these mobile apps are offshoot projects which are often times managed by developers or an application support team within the business unit. In many organizations there is little to no formal operations or best practices around the mobile apps which are often developed by 3rd parties. The new breed of products must appeal to this new buyer, and ensure that developers are present to implement embedded mobile APM instrumentation.
True mobile APM technologies are embedded within native mobile applications, and instrument the code to provide not only mobile perspective, but many provide linkages into infrastructure and application delivery. In the past 2 weeks you have seen several announcements in this market moving it from a synthetic based market to really understanding mobile end user experience and usage details.
Crittercism was previously a crash detection tool, tracking crashes and app launches (look for more research covering them shortly). They are now monitoring the network from a mobile perspective and getting much deeper into the performance from a mobile perspective. Crittercism has a head start since the SDK is already embedded in thousands of native mobile applications, giving them a head start on this market.
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