Hybrid mobile applications allow you to incorporate web-based content into your mobile offerings. By embedding webviews inside your iOS, Android, React Native or Flutter app, you can repurpose existing code to build key mobile functionality, such as authentication processing or ad rendering.
While hybrid apps can help streamline your development process, they can also make monitoring your system more complex. To get full visibility into your hybrid apps, you need to collect and combine data from both web and native mobile sessions. Many traditional monitoring tools only allow you to view activity from one source at a time; as a result, you may get an incomplete picture of your user journey and miss crucial context for events and errors.
Datadog Real User Monitoring (RUM) now identifies, gathers, and connects web and native data from your hybrid apps, giving you unified insight into your user journeys. You can access a step-by-step view of events to spot pain points in your user experience (UX), as well as receive key performance metrics and detailed error messages for faster troubleshooting. By bridging web and mobile event intake, RUM also enables you to automatically detect and instrument webviews with one mobile SDK.
In this post, we’ll look at how monitoring hybrid apps in RUM helps you:
Visualize user journeys from start to finish
RUM collects events from your user sessions to help you analyze every aspect of your UX. With hybrid app support, you can now see web and native events organized into a combined RUM timeline for a complete view of your user sessions. This timeline shows you each step your users took, how long they spent on that step, and whether they ran into any errors along the way.
Each event is marked as being web or native to help you find the source of any UX issues. With hybrid apps, pinpointing where an issue originates is critical for reducing mean time to recovery (MTTR) because it can tell you where to focus your troubleshooting efforts. For example, if your users are experiencing slow loading times when completing a purchase, you may need to determine whether the problem is located in your mobile checkout page or your web-based payment processor. To take a closer look at a step, you can click any event to view additional details. Relevant loaded resources, backend traces, and logs allow you to pinpoint problematic code so you can go directly from analyzing your UX to strategizing improvements.
Optimize your app with performance metrics
RUM provides performance data tailored to both the web and native components of your hybrid app. From the session timeline, you can click an event to view key source-specific metrics. The refresh rate, CPU ticks per second, and memory usage give you visibility into native mobile performance, while Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) provide insight into web views. You can also click error events to view context-specific stack traces, with support for Javascript for web, Java for Android, and Swift for iOS.
For an overall app-level overview of performance over time, you can access visualizations of your hybrid app metrics within RUM Analytics. Analytics gives you different views to choose from—you can analyze performance patterns with timeseries graphs or demographic information with geomaps, for example—and Watchdog Insights automatically detects latency and error outliers to help you quickly spot any unusual activity. You can also view relevant session information for any resource or event directly from the graph, table, or map.
When you want to assess the overall effectiveness of your hybrid app design, you can pivot to Product Analytics to access visualizations related to user engagement. In particular, Product Analytics offers a funnel view to help you identify where you tend to lose users during their journeys. You can use this information to determine whether your web and native features mesh seamlessly and keep users engaged.
Start monitoring your hybrid apps with RUM
RUM gives you full visibility into your hybrid apps by eliminating blind spots and unifying web and native data. The session timeline allows you to analyze your UX and evaluate the cohesiveness of your hybrid design, while performance metrics help you troubleshoot issues and optimize your code across web and native sources. If you’re already a Datadog customer, use our documentation to explore hybrid app monitoring with RUM today. Otherwise, you can get started with a 14-day free trial.
