From Good to Great: How Performance Monitoring Enhanced Our Product

From Good to Great: How Performance Monitoring Enhanced Our Product
Photo by Kai Dahms / Unsplash

Imagine this scenario: you’ve invested over 100 hours meticulously crafting a promising new feature for your app. You've refactored your code, handled exceptions, and ensured error cases are covered. As the sprint concludes, you submit your build, which smoothly passes the testing cycle. Confidently, you deploy the build to the app store, ready for millions of users. Then—mayhem ensues. The app crashes, the code breaks, and you're left scrambling to identify which part of the extensive codebase caused the failure.

Panic!...panic!

To mitigate such real-life nightmares, we integrated a performance monitoring system for error logging and application monitoring across all our apps. This decision has been transformative for maintaining the stability and integrity of our applications. Sentry provides us with detailed and granular data on app usage. For example, a two-week analysis of one of our apps revealed that 7% of runtime exceptions were frequently recurring issues. Addressing this subset can significantly reduce production failure rates and provide insights into our development practices, enabling us to make data-driven decisions across all environments.

The performance monitoring system’s real-time monitoring and logging capabilities in both development and production environments have been invaluable. It allows us to prioritize and resolve exceptions based on frequency and severity, thereby improving the user experience. The platform's integration with our CI/CD pipeline ensures that we catch potential issues before they reach production, maintaining a high level of code quality and reliability.

At Creo, we primarily use the Flutter framework. Flutter's flexibility and efficiency are crucial for our development process, but it also introduces complexities in managing diverse device and OS versions. Given the constraints imposed by certain OEMs (I’m looking at you Samsung!). Performance monitoring system  helps us rule out false positives for exceptions or crashes, preventing potential IT support nightmares. By providing detailed stack traces and context for each error, it allows our developers to quickly identify and fix issues, reducing downtime and improving overall app performance. The performance monitoring system used in our case is Sentry. There are many other alternatives for the same use case such as BugsNag, Highlight.io.

Beyond just error logging, Sentry’s performance monitoring tools give us insights into app performance metrics such as response times, memory usage, and throughput. This holistic view of our app's health helps us proactively address performance bottlenecks and optimize the user experience. We can track trends over time, correlate performance issues with recent code changes, and ensure that our apps perform consistently across all supported platforms.

In summary, running your code without proper oversight is a recipe for instability. Implementing robust monitoring and error logging systems like Sentry ensures consistent product quality over time. By automating error logging and identifying root causes of production failures, we have alleviated pressure on IT operations and streamlined the resolution process, ultimately delivering a more stable product to our users. This proactive approach not only enhances user satisfaction but also empowers our development team to focus on innovation and improvement, knowing that Sentry has our back when it comes to maintaining application health.

Integrating a performance monitoring system  has been a strategic move for us at Creo, enabling us to uphold our commitment to delivering high-quality, reliable software. As we continue to evolve and expand our product offerings, the performance monitoring system  remains a critical component of our development and operations toolkit, ensuring that we can scale confidently and respond swiftly to any challenges that arise.