Last updated at Wed, 25 Oct 2017 15:17:45 GMT

So you’ve just developed a new mobile application. Everything looks fine when you test in-house… yet when you release the application, your users are not so keen, and your application ratings are low…. hmmmmm ….you ask yourself

“is the application buggy or do they simply not like it??”

This can be difficult to ascertain without having access to log data from your mobile apps as they run in the field. Can you be sure that last fix didn’t introduce some new problem?? You can always go and check the crash reports but sometimes this can be a pain to understand, and worse still, you may have to wait some time before devices are synched and the report is sent. So you users may be screaming, but you have no idea that there is a problem….

Wouldn’t it be better if you could control your own logging and have immediate access to how your application is being used in the field??

So now you can … with Logentries you can get full access to all log data produced from your application whether its in test or live and being used by (you hope) lots of customers. You can access all your log data from a single dashboard and figure out whether applications are running as they should – ultimately you can get a better understanding of how users are behaving on your application. The screenshot below shows an example of a Logentries account visualising a  log and giving us information on how many payments have been made over a 2 minute window (note this is only a sample log – although 8 payments in 2 minutes wouldn’t be bad 😉 ).

Better still if your mobile app is communicating with a backend system – as is the case for many enterprise mobile apps – you can easily correlate your mobile app logs with your backend logs. This can be very handy for root cause analysis when trying to figure out the source of a problem. Logentries will also give you statistics on different categories of events, e.g.  percentage of events that were payments vs warnings vs logins etc. and other cool features

Define your own categories of events – e.g for mobile apps maybe you want to tag events from different geographies and figure out where all your hits are coming from.

Ok enough with the sales pitch… and on to more technical matters…

So at Logentries we’ve developed a new logging library for mobile devices (for now android only, iphone coming soon…). The library allows you to log directly from your mobile applications to your Logentries account. It has been designed to have minimal impact on the user application and provides a number of different options around logging:

  1. send logs right away – logs will be sent to Logentries from your app as soon as you log them. There can be can be a small overhead here, but it tends not to effect mobile applications as they are usually single user 🙂 if you are concerned use one of the other options below
  2. buffer your logs – buffer your log events and send them in one go, e.g. maybe you want to send them all before the application closes or at some time when you are happy to do so and not effect the application performance.
  3. Periodic logging – this is a hybrid of the previous two options and allows you to buffer log events and send them to Logentries in one go at particular intervals.

If you are really interested in how this works check out our android library on github and you can get your hands dirty with the code. Once you have the library configured with your app, you will be able to use the full set of Logentries features to tag, search and visualise your events.

Go ahead and try it now by clicking the big button below, after following the wizard register your email and we’ll send you a free account….