A Comprehensive Mobile Monitoring Solution

The demand for enhanced mobile applications, content and services is growing. Keynote Systems’ Mobile Application Perspective gives you a powerful test & measurement solution to keep up. As a real-time on-demand solution, the mobile application  testing and monitoring solution allows you to ensure quality before you push out dynamic content and mobile Web services to live environments.

The first step in mobile testing or monitoring content and mobile Web based services is to pick a desired handset model from over 1,600 available in the library. Mobile Application Perspective will then simulate transactions from the handset you choose across a live network. You can use the worldwide carrier profile to direct transactions across your mobile network of choice. Within minutes you can report on transaction details for any transaction, using any handset model, around the world. You can test mobile content by quickly switching handset models, or carrier networks. This way you can cover more devices and networks all from your desktop.

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Cloud Computing Insights

In a private network world you would have to build and pay for a lot of stuff yourself: multiple data centers, double the hardware, internet access connections on opposite sides of the building, etc. Very quickly the cost of high availability gets prohibitive, locking out all but the deepest of pockets. 

With Cloud Computing,  having access to redundant data centers is just a matter of purchasing the right performance monitoring tools and the engineering time in programming your applications and operational systems to take full advantage of on demand resources. In the end you only pay for what you use of the infrastructure, not what you might need as is the case when doing it yourself. 

Cloud Computing is not outsourcing, this implies a transfer of risk and responsibility. Cloud Computing is a powerful tool to increase performance and availability many fold while reducing costs, if it’s used correctly.

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Interactively Test and Verify Mobile Content

Mobile is the fastest growing mode of access for online content. The biggest challenge associated with the success of mobile content is assuring your users can quickly access it no matter what device they are using.

When it comes to a mobile device simulator, MITE - a desktop tool by Keynote Systems lets you interactively test and verify mobile content by emulating more than 1,800 devices and 11,000 device profiles.

MITE device profile is a unique combination of device manufacturer, device model, user agent and device orientation. The same device model can have different user agents that represent different operating system/firmware versions.

Unlike other mobile device simulators, MITE device profiles also contain device characteristics such as image types supported, screen size, headers supported, hardware features, and more.

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Mobile Monitoring & Analysis - Develop your own expertise in-house.

The first step in improving the user experience for mobile content, services, and applications begins with mobile monitoring and collecting the right mix of performance data. Once you’ve collected that data, the next step is to understand it and make the right decisions to improve your service quality. This is where the challenge lies. It requires time, resources, and expertise to analyze data and make actionable decisions. You can add headcount and develop your own expertise in-house. However, an outsourced solution is often more cost-effective and can instantly bring a broader base of knowledge right to your fingertips.

The mobile portal adapts the company’s standard portal to a form factor that works with mobile devices and can be accessed over various mobile carrier networks. When a user makes a request using a mobile device, the server automatically determines what device the request has come from and returns content that has been adapted to that device—for example by offering fewer graphics and text fitted to the mobile device’s smaller screen.

Mobile Monitoring Strategies

The mobile environment does not consist of a single delivery system to a standardized device interface. Therefore, different strategies need to be deployed to monitor different types of content. Both emulated devices and real devices are employed for mobile monitoring, and a review of both content delivery and monitoring objectives will help determine when each should be used.

Real device monitoring is the only choice. For example, the growing popularity of smartphones has led to a growing market for native applications residing on a device.

However, many classes of applications and services that can be monitored using device emulation.Emulated device monitoring is well suited for websites and services that are accessible by a broad range of mobile devices. These devices range from simple-feature phones to sophisticated smartphones. Many Websites and services require only a browser to render the page and do not depend on the operating system of the device (for example,SMS)

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Mobile Testing Challenges

More than finding errors, the ideal goal of testing should be to understand the quality of offering. Its working, Does it function as planned? Will it meet the customers needs?, etc.

There are unique challenges when it comes to mobile application testing. The challenges of mobile testing will present you with tradeoffs that you will need to consider and choices that you need to make about the mix of different techniques and methods that you will use in testing. Each testing option you consider will have pros and cons associated with it, and you will probably find that no one testing option  will be completely satisfying. Rather, you will need to consider a testing strategy that combines different testing options that together provide you with the best overall testing result that balances the tradeoff between cost, quality, and time to market.

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Mobile Content — A Monitoring Challenge.

One of the most important differences between mobile and desktop-based Web content is the need for mobile content to be tailored for the various characteristics and capabilities of a particular device. This added level of complexity affects development of monitoring strategies, and it must be taken seriously in order to truly understand how the full spectrum of end users accessing mobile content will experience it.

Clearly this expansion of the scope of content monitoring is one of the major differentiators from a  desktop-based Web monitoring strategy. With literally hundreds of device types in circulation and more coming on the market each day, attempting to understand the end-user experience by manually testing content on each device is cost—and time—prohibitive; automated monitoring strategies are required.

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