To add monitoring to your Android app, integrate the Aternity Android Mobile SDK into the
app, and then initialize and perform common monitoring tasks with the API. A monitored mobile app is a regular iOS or
Android app which has Aternity's monitoring
functionality inside, enabling it to report app performance like launch times, errors,
crashes, network traffic, and also custom activities performance, and some mobile
device data.
With the Mobile SDK you can insert API calls to fine-tune the monitoring, by
dynamically setting properties (like the device name, location),
or tag events for use in some types of custom activities, or you can use APIs to report
breadcrumbs for later troubleshooting of
crashes.
Using the API to monitor your mobile app
Before you begin
Ensure your app
compiles and builds cleanly with no errors, and runs on a simulator or a mobile
device.
Before embedding Aternity's
monitoring into an Android mobile app, verify your device conforms to the
following minimum system requirements (Aternity Android Wrapper or
Aternity Android Mobile SDK):
Attribute |
Requirement (Android Wrapper and Aternity Android SDK) |
Operating system
|
Android 4.4 or later.
|
Java Developer Kit
|
JDK 1.8 or later.
|
Programming environment
|
Google Android Studio or a standalone Android SDK.
Using the SDK Manager, install the latest Android SDK tools
(platform tools and build tools) for SDK Platform API level 19
or newer.
|
Connectivity
|
Internet access.
|
App resource usage
|
When you add Aternity functionality to an Android app:
|
To run a monitored app, the device must have
the following operating systems:
Attribute |
Requirement |
Android operating system of monitored device
|
Android 4.4 or later.
|
Procedure
- Step 1
Download Aternity Mobile
from the Aternity Support Site.
To add monitoring to a
mobile app, you
must embed Aternity's monitoring into the app itself, before it is
encrypted. This automatically starts reporting
a wealth of performance and usage data by default.
Download Aternity Mobile
- Step 2
Integrate the Aternity Android Mobile SDK into
your app development environment. For details, see Integrate and Initialize the Aternity Android SDK into your App.
- Step 3
Whenever a class uses the Aternity Android SDK
API methods, you must add the statement:
import com.aternity.sdk.Aternity;
Add an import statement whenever a class uses the API
- Step 4
(Optional) Tweak monitoring parameters with the following APIs:
Use |
Description |
setDeviceName
|
You can set a device name for
a mobile app using the Aternity Mobile SDK, to display custom device names in the
dashboards.
|
setSite or
setOffSite
|
You can set the location's site
name for a mobile app in the Aternity Mobile SDK, to track the performance of all end users in that
location.
|
setUsername
|
You can set a username for a
mobile app in Aternity Mobile SDK to be consistent with desktops and laptops, so you can
track this user's experience across all devices and
platforms.
|
- Step 5
(Optional) You can tag an event to monitor custom activities in your
mobile app by inserting a call to the tagging API.
A custom activity for mobile
apps starts and ends when the app reports specific events which match the events
of an activity's signature file. If Aternity already reports these
events by default, you do not need to add manual API calls. However, for some
custom activities, you must manually tag and report those events using API calls.
Reporting custom events from a mobile app which mark the start and
end of an activity
For example, to
measure the response time between the start of a sign in and its
response, if those events are not automatically reported, insert
an API to tag the sign in action, and add another API call to
tag its response. When you report each tag to Aternity, it matches them to the custom activity already in place, and then reports
the response time in the dashboards. To create your own
custom activities, contact Customer Services.
Tagging a custom event with the API
While Aternity automatically monitors most user actions (native app or
web), if the events you need are not monitored by default, you can tag them
manually as the start or end events of your custom activity.
- a
Mark the event which starts the activity by calling
tagApplication
with
Aternity.Phase.Start
.
The tag APIs return a
newly created AternityContext
object, which
you then send to the server using
reportTag
.
- b
Send the start of the event (the
AternityContext
object) to the Aternity Aggregation Server
by calling reportTag
.
- c
Mark the event which ends the activity by calling
tagApplication
with
Aternity.Phase.End
.
The API returns a new (different) AternityContext
object.
- d
Send the end of the event (the new
AternityContext
object) to the Aternity Aggregation Server
by calling reportTag
.