The Importance of Synthetic Monitoring for Mobile Apps

  August 05, 2020

Does your app’s functional testing end with its release? Do you scramble to fix user-reported bugs?

Given the global nature of most user bases of any mobile app, there is increasingly little-to-no downtime. At any given point, your mobile app is being used by users who expect rich, robust functionality. You simply cannot afford to deliver a subpar mobile app experience.

That’s where 24/7 synthetic monitoring for mobile applications comes in. With the AlertSite integration with BitBar devops and QA teams can finally implement synthetic monitoring to their mobile app testing process. BitBar offers a highly flexible real device cloud for mobile app testing and is part of the SmartBear suite of award-winning software testing products.

But what exactly can an early warning system like AlertSite do to ensure the best user experience for your users? Here are 5 reasons to take your mobile app testing to the next level with synthetic monitoring.

1. Find and fix issues before your users report them with Alerting

Sure, it’s great when mobile developers can quickly fix and address issues that are reported to them by users. But, imagine a more proactive approach that locates those bugs before your user base does. Synthetic monitoring empowers you to emulate user interactions on your mobile applications on a consistent schedule so you can identify the problem, engage subject matter experts, and fix issues before they impact end users. Ensure that key operations, dev, QA and management resources know about issues as they happen in real-time.

2. Monitor complex transactions and business critical processes 

Mobile apps aren’t just for fun anymore. Mobile apps are increasingly complex and handle your businesses most critical transactions. Additional seconds in a workflow can cause a huge change in abandonment rates. Synthetic monitoring allows you to emulate these processes or transactions, such as logging in, adding items to cart, and checking out on a regular basis with scheduled tests. You can monitor the performance and compare stats between different geographies, devices, or operating systems to formulate a plan to improve the performance of these critical flows..
3. Hold 3rd party vendors accountable to reduce risk

Does your app rely on 3rd party integrations and components? If so, these components help contribute to the rich customer experience and robust performance of your app. But, they also represent additional links in the overall chain that makes up your mobile app and one weak link can threaten the whole chain. While it is likely true,  that you have less control over third-party integrations, with synthetic monitoring you can easily monitor, catch issues before your users, and hold third-party providers accountable to their SLAs.
4. Make sure application updates function as intended 

Teams used to schedule periodic releases around their customers low usage times. However, mobile apps receive much more frequent feature updates these days. Each update you push out is a potentially precarious situation that, if not handled correctly, could lead to a host of frustrated users. Synthetic monitoring is a great way to keep tabs on your releases as you release them en masse into the wild to catch issues before they end up on Twitter.

5. Visualize and benchmark all your testing and performance metrics

Imaging having a home page with all your testing, monitoring and performance benchmarks and metrics on one reporting dashboard. Synthetic monitoring with AlertSite delivers better data to give your team a more holistic view of the automated tests you schedule to run on your mobile applications.

Bringing 24/7 synthetic monitoring from AlertSite to mobile application testing with BitBar is a great opportunity for SmartBear users to further improve the performance of their mobile apps. As a bonus, by integrating with BitBar, you can reuse the testing scripts from BitBar projects as your monitors in AlertSite. Don’t take our word for it; sign up for our Free Trial to take it for a test drive yourself!