The Fallacy of “Full-Stack” Observability Tools

The term "full-stack" observability has been thrown around for quite some time, promising fewer outages, five-nines uptime, and reduced MTTR. Many observability tools and platforms have been quick to capitalize on this trend and bill themselves as “full-stack observability tools” that can deliver a holistic view of the health of your system and all its components.

While that might be true for web apps, this term is a misnomer for mobile apps. This post will explore why most “full-stack observability tools” just don’t cut it for mobile teams.

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Full-stack observability platforms will be quick to point out their support for mobile apps but more often than not, the level of that support leaves much to be desired. They might be reporting some telemetry from the mobile app, but in most cases, much more is needed to make your mobile app observable.

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Web vs. mobile: apples and oranges

It’s not just a matter of the depth and breadth of the telemetry. Mobile development is a paradigm shift from web development and needs a different, better-tailored approach.

Full-stack observability typically refers to monitoring web applications, encompassing the front-end, back-end, and infrastructure. This works well when you’re running your apps on your servers and delivering them through your network and infrastructure.

On the other hand, mobile apps run several different versions on a huge variety of environments and devices to which you do not have access. Mobile teams are not purely front-end and manage complex state logic, data persistence, and other "backend-like" functionalities – all while remaining distinct from centralized backend teams. Often, these backend services belong to separate "full-stack" teams responsible for web development, leaving mobile developers in a silo.

Moreover, the technologies and frameworks used by mobile app developers are completely different and distinct from web development. Full-stack observability tools offer poor support for mobile-specific technologies like React Native and Flutter or native declarative frameworks like SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose, giving mobile teams an incomplete or inaccurate picture of their mobile app performance.

Finally, since mobile apps don’t run on your servers, you will always have several different versions of your app running simultaneously. This breaks the traditional time-based view of performance data used by full-stack observability tools, making it difficult to separate the issues you have fixed in your latest version from the ones occurring in earlier versions of your app.

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Full-stack for web, not mobile

The truth is that most vendors who bill themselves as full-stack observability providers focus on the world of web development – back-end services, infrastructure, and front-end experiences. Mobile, with its unique challenges, gets left behind.

This massive disconnect between full-stack observability and mobile development realities is sadly much too common. In fact, in a conversation with an Ops leader at a top software company responsible for "full-stack observability", I was shocked when I learned they have never interacted with a mobile developer in their 13 years with the company.

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What mobile teams do need

So, what do mobile teams need to achieve true observability of their apps? Here are some key aspects:

1. Release perspective: as mentioned earlier, mobile apps always have several versions running at any given time. Aggregating telemetry by time instead of the app version can mask emerging issues in your newest and most-adopted versions. Mobile teams need tools that adopt this perspective and tailor their approach to mobile development.
2. User-centric mobile health metrics: The legacy health and performance metrics used for web development can’t accurately represent the vastly different mobile user experience. Mobile teams need centralized dashboards with mobile-specific health metrics (crashes, ANRs, app launch, loading time, etc.) to enable the developers to identify areas across the entire stack requiring attention.
3. The right tools and seamless handoff: While there is merit to using a single platform for your entire stack, you first need to ensure it can actually deliver observability over every part of your stack. This is not currently an option for mobile teams.
   Mobile teams need tools that facilitate a smooth debugging experience by starting with user experience issues and seamlessly transitioning to the relevant backend service data when needed.

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All-in-one full-stack observability solutions are not currently sufficient to satisfy the unique requirements of mobile, and won’t be any time soon. Mobile teams have to choose between achieving full-stack observability with more than one tool or sacrificing mobile observability for an all-in-one solution. Successful mobile teams understand that this is not an acceptable trade-off and demand tools that cater to the specific needs of mobile app development.
To achieve a holistic view of mobile app health, from client-side user experience to backend operations, mobile teams need an observability tool that supports their mobile development stack, delivers detailed stability and performance data, and integrates with the rest of their observability tools directly or through an open standard like OpenTelemetry.

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Instabug is a powerful mobile observability tool designed for mobile development teams from the ground up to deliver a comprehensive view of their mobile app’s user experience. It provides the most detailed, mobile-specific telemetry on the market, support for modern mobile development frameworks, integrations with popular backend monitoring tools, support for OpenTelemetry standards, exceptional customer support, and much more.

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Stability and error monitoring

Instabug offers extensive issue detection capabilities for all types of errors that occur in mobile apps. Every report comes with comprehensive data to help fix issues faster, including steps to reproduce errors, network requests, console logs, device and environment details, and much more.

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Mobile-first performance monitoring

Understand your app’s user experience with performance monitoring that is purpose-built to capture the intricacies of the mobile experience. Instabug's APM gives you a detailed view of your app’s performance as perceived by your users, aligns your team around a north-start metric that reflects your user experience, and helps you foster a performance-minded culture.

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Release monitoring and management

Instabug’s release-centric perspective makes it easy for mobile teams to prioritize the stability and performance of their most recent and most adopted app versions and quickly identify and address issues occurring in them. Additionally, with app store integrations and a powerful alerts and rules engine, Instabug enables mobile teams to streamline and automate their release and rollout management process.

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Key app flow and feature flag monitoring

Track the performance of your app’s critical user journeys, including completion rate, completion time, and performance to identify issues that affect them and optimize their performance. Additionally, you can monitor the performance of your feature flags to understand the performance of your app’s variants and isolate any issues they introduce.

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Visual mobile session replay

Instabug’s AI-enabled Session Replay records all your app’s sessions, capturing a series of screenshots along with all the events, actions, logs, and more, enabling you to eliminate needless back-and-forth between teams, easily verify and reproduce issues, and determine their root cause. Additionally, Instabug ensures user privacy out of the box with customizable levels of auto-masking to protect sensitive information.

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Integration with backend monitoring and data visualization tools

Instabug enables you to achieve end-to-end visibility over your network requests by integrating with popular backend monitoring tools and enables you to consolidate and visualize telemetry by integrating with Grafana and respecting OpenTelemetry standards. This makes it possible to capture detailed mobile performance data and connect it to the rest of your data to achieve true full-stack observability.