Personify Health expedites issue resolution and streamlines the SRE release process with Embrace

With a vast userbase spanning multiple countries alongside high user engagement, Personify Health encountered challenges in maintaining a fast issue resolution process alongside a seamless user experience.

Their previous tooling lacked an intuitive interface and failed to provide comprehensive data. This made it difficult for the Personify Health mobile team and presented a few key challenges, including:

• Unreliable, difficult-to-read data: Personify Health previously used a limited crash reporting tool and a legacy real user monitoring tool for their Android and iOS apps, both of which left them without a clear, intuitive way to solve problems. This both slowed and complicated the investigation and debugging processes.
• Unclear root causes of issues: Before Embrace, the Personify Health team struggled to track down the source of issues and keep their SRE checks fast and efficient, wasting time and resources. Now, the team uses Embrace for SRE app checks when releasing a new app version, investigating downtime events, and identifying root causes of issues.

Personify Health struggled to maintain a streamlined issue resolution process and establish an effective SRE routine. With Embrace, Personify Health achieves faster issue resolution and greater efficiency within their SRE teams, and ensures a superior user experience.

Embrace improves Personify Health’s approach to issue resolution by offering a seamless and comprehensive solution. Before using Embrace, the team relied on a combination of a limited crash reporting tool and a legacy real user monitoring tool, and encountered limitations that hindered efficient debugging and investigation processes.

While their crash reporting tool provided crash-tracking capabilities, it could not track crash-free user sessions, leaving Personify Health without crucial insight into a wide range of user behaviors. In contrast, Embrace’s User Session Insights offer a holistic view of user interactions, helping Personify Health identify and address issues proactively. Armin Mahmutovic, senior engineering manager at Personify Health, highlighted the need for the data which their limited crash reporting tool and legacy real user monitoring tool failed to provide.

“Our crash reporting tool lacked key features our team needs like Custom Dashboards, Network Monitoring, and the ability to capture ANRs under the 5-second mark, all of which help the team pinpoint issues with precision,” Armin said. “Our legacy real user monitoring tool’s slow performance, unintuitive interface, and steep learning curve made it difficult for the team to keep track of data during investigations.”

The cumbersome process of piecing together data and fixing issues within their legacy real user monitoring tool’s framework further impeded Personify Health’s ability to streamline their debugging efforts.

“We need reliable and easy-to-read data along with steps to attempt to reproduce the issue,” Armin noted. “This was complicated on our legacy real user monitoring tool, as we needed to know exactly what to look for, join multiple tables to get all the relevant data, and fix the tool’s bugs throughout the process. For example, many of the timestamps would be incorrect for logs like breadcrumbs.”

Embrace helped eliminate these issues and offered Personify Health unparalleled ease of use. By leveraging Embrace’s Error Tracking, stack traces, and network monitoring capabilities, the Personify Health team has been able to streamline and significantly improve the efficiency of their issue resolution processes.

Embrace plays a pivotal role in ensuring app reliability and performance. Integrated seamlessly into their release checklist and reporting procedures, Embrace has changed how Personify Health monitors and addresses issues within their mobile app.

“Embrace is an integral part of our Mobile SRE routine as a part of our periodic release checklist and reports,” Armin detailed. “Our previous tool was more designed to give you information if you knew exactly where to look for it. The user session investigation with this tool was tedious, where Embrace sessions provide value out of the box.”

With Embrace’s comprehensive insights and analytics, Personify Health engineers can delve deep into niche core and network library crashes, feature-specific issues, app startup times, ANRs, network requests, and crash-free user metrics. This granular visibility helps the SRE team efficiently address potential issues before they affect user experiences.

When conducting performance checks, Personify Health leverages Embrace dashboards to analyze critical performance metrics. By monitoring the Moments tab, the team is able to notice changes in startup duration, completion, and performance regressions in key user flows in their app. These insights help the Personify Health team optimize app performance and ensure a seamless user experience. When working with HTTP requests, for example, the Network Monitoring tab allows Personify Health to review data like successful and failed requests, response times for critical API endpoints, and error logs.

As a final step in their release checklist, Personify Health conducts a comprehensive comparison of app releases. This includes evaluating crash rates, metrics of performance, and user engagement in order to identify areas for improvement.

The right features and intuitive interface allow Personify Health to keep track of important data and conduct thorough investigations, limiting the frustrations and inefficiencies presented by other tools.

Personify Health is committed to enhancing the health and wellbeing of their users, and leveraging Embrace allows them to further that goal by providing superior mobile experiences.

“Our future plans with Embrace represent a significant investment in advancing our mobile observability and quality improvement initiatives,” Armin said. “We plan to continue to use Embrace to gain deeper insights into user behavior and app performance, driving continuous enhancements to our user experience.”

Learn how Embrace can help you expedite issue resolution or be leveraged as a powerful SRE tool by requesting a demo today.