Xamarin Insights: A New Tool for Monitoring Cross-Platform Mobile Apps

Over 1,200 mobile developers converged on Atlanta for the 2014 edition of Xamarin Evolve, the annual conference held by San Francisco-based software company Xamarin. And in one of the conference sessions, Xamarin announced the beta release of the company’s latest product: Xamarin Insights. This brand new feature is designed to improve your apps with real-time monitoring.

For any app to be successful, developers need to have excellent crash reporting and analytics tools at their disposal. The ideal solution must provide insight into the manner in which users are interacting with apps with events, provide comprehensive error reporting, prioritize key issues that customers are experiencing, provide complete cross-platform support, and fully integrate crash reporting and analytics.

Unfortunately, some developers have limited time and too much data for interpretation, and consequently they do not know which crash issues to take care of first. Following up on last year’s Xamarin Test Cloud, which allows developers to test their apps on multiple devices to enhance the user experience, Xamarin Insights—with a simple and effective API—enables developers to point out, report, and track issues that users are experiencing.

With just a few lines of code, adding Insights into the app is easy. Developers are then granted access to a wide range of statistics—from past and active sessions to operating system and screen resolution. This makes it easier to identify error patterns, as well as their frequency of occurrence. Additionally, Xamarin Insights enables developers to track events, which include button touches, page views, and length of operations. Tracking on Insights makes it easier to figure out the app features that are being used, and which ones are being neglected.

In some cases, it might be really hard to reproduce bugs. This can happen if developers have no information about the user’s device or no roadmap on determining the necessary steps for pulling up the issue. So, Insights enables the combination of tracking and user identification, and includes the ability to email the user as notification that the issue has been taken care of.

With Xamarin Insights, developers can easily see everything: the users that are online, their location, the devices they are using, the activities they have used in sessions, and the issues they have experienced. That way, developers are more prepared to face and solve issues, or implement updates and fixes.

Xamarin Insights can also be used to identify the most popular features within an app, thus enabling analysts to measure demand for specific elements and enhance them accordingly. Using the application’s visual representations of usage patterns, developers can then prioritize key issues based on user demand.

Insights enables developers and analysts to review key statistics for both desktop and mobile applications across all platforms that Xamarin supports. Moreover, to enhance real-time feedback, the feature easily integrates with services that include Campfire, GitHub, HipChat, Jira, PivotalTracker, and Visual Studio Online. That way, developers and analysts get immediate notifications on the most crucial information.

At press time Xamarin Insights is available to all active Xamarin subscribers as a preview at no additional charge. Pricing for the new feature will be revealed at the end of the preview period.