This is a guest blog post from Justin Liu of Crittercism, which provides mobile app performance management. Crittercism products monitor every aspect of mobile app performance, allowing Developers and IT Operations to deliver high performing, highly reliable, highly available mobile apps.

Mobile apps are now critical for all types of businesses. Whether your company builds an eCommerce app for consumers or a CRM app for enterprises, your apps need to work all the time. The first step in having a high performing mobile app is to ensure that any app you build and manage is stable and responsive.

The worlds of DevOps and mobile development are colliding. Like in any successful DevOps team, this means empowering your mobile developers with real-time visibility into mobile app performance so they can quickly identify and resolve problem areas. Here’s a short guide to two mobile metrics that matter to your users and your business.

Where Mobile Monitoring Complexity Comes From

Before diving into the metrics, it’s important to note that there is a range of considerations that you normally don’t need to think about in the web world.  Why does your app crash in China but not in the US?  How does performance differ across OS versions?  What is the effect of carrier latency on transaction conversion rates in your shopping app?  There are millions of questions you can only ask once your mobile app has been released into the wild.

Some factors that affect performance are outside your control, such as devices, operating systems, and networks.

The complexity increases as your app starts connecting to cloud services, such as social platforms, analytics tools, and ad platforms.  Even if you are building an internal B2E (business-to-employee) app, you may rely on proprietary ERP systems that you access through the cloud.

Two Metrics You Need to Track

Every month at Crittercism we monitor over 30 billion mobile app sessions and have found that the two most important mobile app performance metrics are:

1. Uptime. Our data shows that mobile app uptime, meaning the percent of app loads that don’t crash, must be greater than 99% for your app to be competitive in public app stores. Through stack traces, remote logging and other types of root cause analysis, Crittercism lets developers pin down the exact causes of problems in their apps.

2. Responsiveness. In addition, responsiveness of  your app’s service calls requires a latency of under one second to satisfy users.

Decrease Mobile Downtime

Crashes and cloud service errors are the primary culprits of poorly performing mobile apps, and Crittercism is the only product that combines error monitoring with service monitoring for mobile platforms.  Now you can trigger alerts for any metric that Crittercism tracks.  By integrating Crittercism with PagerDuty, you ensure that you’re using the same systems for monitoring mobile apps that you already use for the rest of your DevOps infrastructure.

Integrate Crittercism and PagerDuty today to start delivering high performing mobile apps.