Most teams that work on mobile apps are probably familiar with this frustrating scenario: your backend monitoring dashboards say “everything is fine,” but your end users are complaining about a performance issue. So what’s going on?
In many cases, this misalignment happens when organizations rely solely on standard DevOps SLOs – or Service Level Objectives – to monitor the health and performance of mobile apps. While classic SLOs are great for understanding overall system resources and infrastructure availability, they are not designed to give you insight into what your end users are actually experiencing.
This can result in unmet performance expectations and, in some cases, lost revenue due to user churn. On the flip side, it can wreak havoc on your team’s ability to effectively prioritize feature development vs. reliability work, forcing engineers to drop everything to solve an issue that your users aren’t even noticing.
At Embrace, we’re serious about helping engineering teams avoid these pitfalls by monitoring and analyzing client-side data that’s built for the intricacies of mobile and that puts the user experience front and center.
That’s why we’ve developed our very own guide on this topic: Defining and measuring mobile SLOs: Best practices for modern DevOps, SRE, and mobile teams.
This guide covers important considerations for crafting mobile SLOs that can help teams with prioritization, collaboration, and ensuring a great end-user experience. These include:
- Why mobile SLOs matter: An overview of the benefits of mobile SLOs, such as improving app performance visibility, making data-driven decisions, and fostering collaboration between DevOps and mobile teams.
- How to focus on user experiences: Real, concrete guidance on building SLOs around crucial end-user flows, not just technical metrics like memory usage or API success rates.
- Understanding differences from backend observability: Dissecting some of the unique challenges of working with mobile vs. backend systems, like delayed and high cardinality data, unpredictable runtime environments, and user behaviors. Plus, how you can mitigate these conditions to craft better SLOs.
- How to think about your error protocol: Looking at what to do when things go wrong, planning your error budgets, and documenting your response.
- Iterating and collaborating across teams: How to embrace the approach of trial-and-error, determine your baselines, and get buy-in across mobile, DevOps, and product teams to make sure your SLOs are serving your business goals.
Ultimately, this guide arms engineering teams with the tools they need to keep their end users happy while balancing their development priorities.
To get these insights today, download the free guide here.
Defining and measuring mobile SLOs guide
Grab your copy of this guide for practical, actionable advice to build and maintain SLOs that keep end users and engineers happy.
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