PurePerformance - Mobile App Intelligence with Dominik Punz

Episode Date: January 29, 2019

Dominik Punz shares his insights on his session about Dynatrace support for mobile platforms and how to intelligently monitor your mobile apps and what you can discover from troubleshooting, to enhancing user experience.

Coming to you from Dynatrace Perform in Las Vegas, it's Pure Performance! Hello from Dynatrace Perform 2019 in Las Vegas. I'm Andy Grabner and this is Up Close and Personal with Product Management on Pure Performance. I want to introduce my guest, Dominic Bunz. Dominic, I just saw you walking out of your breakout session so you did one with one of our customers. Who was the customer? Hi Andy, yeah, I just did a breakout session

with Rod Luisa from Bell Canada. Cool, so they telephone Bell. Yes, exactly. And yeah, they were talking about how they use Dynatrace to fully see everything, get full insight into their whole app development process. Cool. And I think it's, if I remember the session, you talked about mobile performance, right? So it's all about mobile development? Yes, it's mobile monitoring. So Bell Canada has a lot of different mobile apps and until now they also did a lot of mobile apps externally, so they had other companies doing it for them.

But right now they are in the process of really internalizing the whole development process. And it's important to them to have a single tool that gives them insight into the whole development process, the whole lifecycle of their app. So they want to start monitor performance as well as any problems as soon as possible so that they fix bugs as soon as possible so that they fix bugs as soon as possible and they also have already good experience when the app finally goes public and people start using it. Cool.

That's actually interesting. They say they want to do lifecycle because the two of us, we've been pushing Dynatrace and CI-CD over the last couple of years. You used to be on the product management side where we implemented the test automation features in AppMon, right? Yeah. And now we're back again with Dynatrace with our third generation AIOps product

and now still talk about Dynatrace in CI, CD. So that's pretty cool. What are the... So you mentioned in-housing. So basically the in-house application development. Why is that? Did you give any reasons for that? Yeah, so one thing you can see all over the industry is that mobile apps are a very important piece now to make business. So it's no longer just the web.

And you can just look at yourself maybe and think, how are you shopping on Amazon? I mean, most of the time, I'm sure you'll be browsing through products in your native app. And maybe you still do the sale or the buy on the web. It could be because it's easier to enter a credit card number or anything, but it is very important to have mobile. Yeah, so maybe back in the days, let's say in the first phase of mobile apps, maybe many companies just thought we need to have a mobile presence, but let's just outsource it to get something out there.

And now they realize how important that mobile channel really is to the end users. And therefore you have to have high quality, fast turnaround, CI, CD continuous. So they do continuous delivery, that means, really? Like pushing a new mobile app? So they have several stages and every stage of the mobile app gets monitored for the first app. So basically what we were talking in the talk was that they started using Dynatrace for, they are building a mobile app right now. It's called PC Mobile.

And basically this app should be some sort of a blueprint. So they are right now in the process of finding out how mobile development should work. Dynatrace is used as the one source where they collect all the metrics. And actually last week the PC mobile went live. So before that it was going through all the other stages and now it's in production. And one thing they noticed here again was that somehow they messed up some, it's not messed up, but some tests running on the actual published mobile app are now interfering with the production monitoring because they just send in lots of Selenium test data that's actually not intended to show up as new users.

Ah, okay, so basically having the classical problem of detecting synthetic traffic correctly, so not to skew with your production data data where people actually make decisions on, right? Yeah, so right now we are thinking how could they figure out whether it's test traffic or production traffic. And most certainly the way how they are going to solve it is that they will run the tests with a different build that's reporting in a different application so that's cool because in damage ways you have the capability to

differentiate between versions so you can say this version is obviously a test version yeah what about uh i know you and others in the product management team are driving uh things like session properties i'm not sure if this is something for like where we can actually tag individual users with metadata would that be also an approach of course so there's gonna be lots of possibilities coming in the future so especially on the mobile side right now there's lots of new features coming, so we just introduced dashboarding for mobile apps. And this actually is now an integral piece of Rod's work, because all the dashboards they use for reporting right now are based on these metrics. So a year ago Dynatrace wouldn't have helped them that much. Right now we are in the process of building the multi-dimensional analysis so things you

already know from web monitoring where it's possible to filter and group all your user actions between different properties so there's lots of out-of-the-box things like you know like location or OS version things like that but obviously we're also bringing generic session properties and user action properties as well and these will also be possible to be used for the analysis. Cool, so as an example I could think of maybe show me the user behavior for premium users versus let's say regular customer, things like that. Any other things that you discussed in your session? Remember that people that are listening to this are probably not here right now in Vegas

but your session has been recorded. Is there anything else you say this is one of the reasons why I think somebody should watch your recording? Yeah, what I really liked about the session was the way how Rod explained to us the quick wins are. So he basically made sure that Dynatrace is monitoring the app and then it was really easy for him to figure out certain bad feedback he got from different testing departments and yeah it was really easy to identify whether it's some problem in the back end that made the app slow. Or like in one example, he told us then,

yeah, and when he looked at the data, so he found the session in Dynatrace, and then he saw, hey, this version, that's a debug build. So this is supposed to be slow, because it's collecting a lot of additional data. And obviously that's great, because otherwise you're hunting a problem that is not really a problem, because it's baked in. Yeah. That's pretty cool. So

Dominik, you're here from the product management team. If people actually happen to be here at Performer listening to this and they want to meet you to learn more about mobile monitoring, will you be around I guess at the innovation lab? Yes. With all the towers that we have over there? Yeah, most of the time you can find me there. Any other things where you say people want to learn more about mobile? This is where they should go whether it's a blog post whether it's a special page and documentation Or reaching out to you or somebody else. What's the best way to get to learn more about mobile monitoring with Dynatrace? Yeah, so there is some some basic introductions, there are some webinars online already on

Dynatrace University about mobile. Otherwise reach out to me or to anybody else that's at the Innovation Center. Perfect, I will put your name so Dominic Kunz, but I'm sure people have a way to track you down. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Well, Dominic, thanks first of all. Enjoy the rest. Let's both enjoy the rest of the show.

And for Pure Performance, I'm Andy Graffi.