Earlier today, CA Technologies announced the general availability of a new release of CA Mobile App Analytics (MAA) - CA MAA 14.4.
As you may know, CA Mobile App Analytics is a unique solution that provides your business analysts, app developers, IT operations and support teams with the complete visibility and the insights needed to achieve user loyalty and maximize potential value to customers. This is available in both SaaS as well as on-premise product and is seemelessly integrated with CA Application Performance Management (APM) 9.7.
It provides a comprehensive solution to visualize and analyze user experience and app health, capture and investigate issues and inform app teams with real-world customer usage data to deliver the most impactful features and fixes in the next app update.
In addition to supporting the enhancements required to integrate with CA APM 9.7 for complete visibility into application lifecycle from mobile to mainframe, CA MAA 14.4 has multiple enhancements in the areas of customer info tagging, user tagging, console improvements , Android symbolication , extended browser support etc.
Let me talk about some of the highlights of CA MAA 14.4 :
End to End visibility of Mobile Transactions with APM 9.7
The enhancements in CA Mobile App Analytics 14.4 enabled the integration with CA APM 9.7 to enable the enterprises to get complete end-to-end visibility into Mobile transactions. This integration into APM creates a Mobile-to-Mainframe APM solution providing end-to-end proactive monitoring for mobile transactions. Now, in the APM dashboard, you can view mobile transactions, along with real-user sessions and synthetic transactions in a single location.
In the Mobile App Analytics, you can now track and monitor key business transactions – how they performed, latency, number of successes, number of failures crashes, details about sessions, crash stack trace, other events in that session. For example , in the following screenshot of MAA, you can see multiple mobile transactions and details associated with them .
Let's look at the “Shop – View Product” transaction above for example. If you want to know why this transaction took longer to execute or was abandoned either due to a bad user experience, failed because of a crash or any other backend issue, you can now enable transaction tracing and view the transaction traces spanning different components of application back-end in CA APM.
Customer/User info Tagging
MAA 14.4 added the ability to search for specific user info, then understand how the app has performed for that specific user. This will help immensely in both pre-production and post-production use cases. For example, in the pre-production mode someone is evaluating and wants to see how the app has performed . Another post-production example can be an use case where a certain user has requested support (for a crash or latency), you will need to search for all sessions that the user has interacted with the app, then look at the details based on the user acc # or other identifier (custom info) – • Ability to search for sessions by user info
Improvements on console: Measure effectiveness
Mobile App Analytics 14.4 also bring a key improvement to the console. It's the ability to measure effectiveness by comparing the performance of your app within a specific dimension: apps, OS, regions, devices. For example, you can compare how your app is performing after a set of users upgraded to iOS latest version - simply pick a mobile application and compare end-user performance on iOS8 Vs iOS7. These insights can help inform your business strategy. So taking the iOS example further, if your iOS8 app is performing better for your end-users than iOS7 app, then you can pump up your marketing efforts to get iOS7 users upgraded to iOS8 stat. And gain better user experience, ultimately improve customer retention.
Custom Event Support
This version of MAA allows you get custom information to bring more context to the interaction or business workflow as you diagnose app issues. Further, you can answer questions like: what’s the value of that interaction, what’s the opportunity cost? We call it Custom Event Tagging. Let’s take an example, you can tag your Gold or Platinum customers and look at impact on top line. Also tag app performance issues based on number of items in shopping cart when greater than 100 or if value of items in the cart is greater than $75, let’s say. Screenshot below illustrates these business events being tagged. CA MAA allows you to understand these interactions and business impact.
Screenshot Capability with Profile Controls
You can now capture the app screenas it’s being executed. Capturing that specific screen that resulted in an issue or latency enables to fix issues faster and drive improved experience for your end-users. See the illustrations below with the screencap on the right side. This capability can also be useful for testing part of the DevOps lifecycle.
In addition to these features, CA MAA 14.4 release added support for:
- Ability to tag specific users to devices
- Console new features: analytics comparison, new event details navigation, additional metrics, offline access to crash
- Improvements to Android Symbolication and expanded browser support
- iOS 8, Android 5 (L)
- Hybrid app support certified for: Appcelerator, Cordova, PhoneGap
To Learn more about these features and how to get started with CA Mobile App Analytics 14.4 , how to integrate your apps with the CA MAA SDK or how to integrate CA APM with CA MAA, please refer to CA Mobile App Analytics 14.4 Wiki Page.
You can try the CA Mobile App Analytics solution by signing up for Free CA MAA Trial .