New Relic moves ahead with mobile-app performance monitoring

Application performance management player New Relic, running on a recent $ 80-million round of funding and aiming for a 2014 public offering, is adding support for native Android and iOS mobile apps, showing further evidence of the importance of mobile devices for business.

In a statement, New Relic called its new native mobile app monitoring capability the first service of its kind. Alongside visualizations of desktop performance, the Software as a Service (SaaS) shows developers in real time what consumers see on their mobile devices. The approach differs from the application performance management for mobile devices available from Compuware and Hewlett-Packard, as “they’re generating fake mobile loads in order to tell you how a fake mobile app is doing,” said Jim Gochee, senior vice president of product at New Relic.

With its mobile monitoring abilities, New Relic also differentiates itself from fellow application performance management vendor AppDynamics, which has been on a capital-raising spree of its own.

New Relic’s new mobile app support highlights the importance of smartphones and tablets in the cloud computing revolution, for consumer and enterprise applications alike. And the trend will likely persist. Forrester Research projects sales of mobile devices will keep growing. A 2012 Pew Research Center survey found that 25 percent of kids aged 12-17 use their phones — as opposed to PCs — as their primary means of accessing the internet. That figure is 15 percent for adults. In other words, mobile apps could become the main route for customers to communicate with businesses. That’s why providing better monitoring for them is a smart move.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

  • How devops can reduce cycle times
  • Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
  • A near-term outlook for big data


GigaOM