The benefits are the ease of integration into OMI, the speed of the deployment, and the quick ROI in value that it adds in a space where we were kind of flying blind before we had it.

My advice to a colleague would probably be around all the areas that I discussed. It's a very user friendly product, it is fast, it's stable, and it just flat-out works, and gives you views in data that, or valuable insights into our customer experience.

The first thing I would tell you is to do a trial. You can do a free trial, HPE will give them a temporary license and you'll be able to monitor an application for free within minutes. Especially with web applications. It's very easy. Just give it a try and see how easy it really is and see the data that you're going to get back and how quickly you're going to get it. The only surprise I think you're going to find is that they're going to be surprised at what they uncover about your apps.

There's really not, in my opinion, that much of a downside to it. However, false positives is definitely something you will need to watch out for. Before we automatically send an alert to the operations center, we watched it for months to make sure that we weren't setting the threshold too low. We were able to set thresholds for performance and availability right within AppPulse. If we set the threshold too low, you could generate a false positive because saying that apps not as well performing as it should be when you don't have enough data to understand how the performance is really supposed to be. I think you really need to know your application to set those thresholds.

I work in a pharmaceutical environment which is highly regulated. Our corporate users are using applications and software following procedures and guidelines which are predefined, to maintain compliance.

However, users using mobile apps (company/internal app or public/patient app) and the associated device are not intended to strictly follow the rules and guidelines for regulated apps. Most of the time they are trying to use them not exactly as expected: skipping steps, not using the app for what is was designed to do, using functionalities which are considered less important. So, initially we did not extensively test all the various network conditions.

Having the real/user pathway is helping us to adjust what is important for the user and develop appropriate testing strategies.

HP has released new versions of Mobile Center, which helps to automate app testing across a variety of real devices. Mobile Center also integrates new versions of LoadRunner, the firm’s load testing software, and Performance Center, which can be used to test app performance. There is also an updated version of StormRunner Load, a cloud-based service that can test with thousands of virtual users from different geographies.

I would tell someone researching to think about AppPulse mobile because I think that this product has a unique feature which we have found valuable – crash trail. When the user experiences a crash I can see on the web/app the entire flow from launch to crash so I can understand what caused the crash and how to fix it for the user.

We believe that only by monitoring the entire cycle, including with user flows, we will be able to focus on what's most important to fix and enhance.

I think it is important to compare this HPE tool with other tools in the market. Also decide the proper time to implement it. In our case, it was about what was not proactive, unfortunately; what was reactive. I recommend doing that before deploying mobile applications, even more so at this time of digital transformation. I know many companies will be deploying mobile services. It is important to have from the beginning a tool that measures and monitors the user experience, before deploying it in production. That is my recommendation.

It has to be a SaaS solution, self-learning, and easy to implement. It should give you suggestions based on the data and tell you where to focus, rather than have the data sitting there requiring you to figure out what to do with it. There should be a logical dashboard.

I’d say that having a mobile app without a solution like AppPulse Mobile is like driving a car without headlights at night. The instant gratification you get when you see actionable data from the dashboard, giving you intelligence based on statistics and not on intuition, will allow you to develop a five star app. This gives you happy customers and happy developers. It also gives the developers greater focus.

It helped me a lot at the very beginning of my community to solve crashes and performance issues at a very critical time for my company.

In order to do a good deployment, do things in small steps and think it through, don’t do it all at once. You need to choose the right app to invest in, and you need to pick your battles.

Feel free to contact me, I’ll be happy to help.

Be in contact with HP support – you will get good support. Get the free trial and then you can see the benefits for your self – very fast and easy.

Go through the experience I did, and then you will know it yourself. But I recommend it.

The application is very practical.

For us it is easy. It is friendly and it has information that is important for the business. The most important is the GUI and interpreting the information is easy to learn.

It is the application that helps us fix crashes and improve applications further.