Updates to Embrace’s User Sessions and Timeline

With new advanced filters, engineers can now isolate very specific user sessions that meet certain criteria. 

You’ll be able to build complex queries by combining multiple conditions using the AND/OR operators, creating highly specific segments of your user base. Additionally, the feature supports nested filters to allow for even more granularity of conditions, as well as the option to save your filters, which is a huge plus for engineers building particularly complicated user segments for analysis.

Last year we introduced our Performance Tracing feature, which allows engineers to monitor any user flow within their app by instrumenting the span datatype around the smaller operations that make up the flow. 

Now, we’ve made spans more useful within the Embrace platform by integrating them into the User Sessions filter. You can now filter individual sessions by various span metadata, including the span’s name, duration, outcome, and attribute key/value pairs. 

This new filter support means that you can isolate sessions that experienced a certain type of span — for example, a span that took too long or was abandoned — and go on to examine that span within the context of the full User Timeline. 

Not only can you filter User Sessions by individual spans that constitute a Performance Trace, you can now see the details of the trace within the User Timeline. 

Any traces that have been created from multiple, connected spans are now visible within the trail of technical events that makes the timeline so useful. You’ll see the trace name, its start and end time, its duration, and a marker of its success or failure.

With traces now in the Timeline, you’ll get a more complete understanding of how your app’s critical user flows fit within the full experience of a session. Plus, you can visualize user flows within the context of other events that happened before and after them, such as network calls or crashes, in order to understand how these events may be influencing each other.

We’ve also made it easier to go from analyzing a trace instance on its own page to finding that trace within a unique user session. It now only takes one click from the Performance Tracing view to see the session timeline, where you can analyze that trace within the context of all other user events. 

We’ve been doing a lot of work behind the scenes to revamp our Logs product at Embrace. This includes supporting larger log messages, displaying logs in their raw form (in addition to aggregations) within the dashboard, and providing a free-text search capability for log messages. As part of this work, we’ve also created a more direct way to navigate from the Logs page to the User Timeline. 

Using this is easy: Simply click the timeline icon next to the individual log you’d like to see within the context of the user’s full session. You’ll then be brought to the Session Timeline, to the exact point where this log was captured, with a stack trace of the issue visible in an optional, expanded view.

These updates are part of our ever-expanding work to provide engineers with the most context-rich data into their end user’s mobile experiences. That’s because we know firsthand the difficulty of troubleshooting performance issues in isolation. 

Learn more by checking out the rest of our platform, or request a demo to see Embrace in action.