Bring best-in-class mobile observability into your full data ecosystem with our Metrics API.

The Embrace Metrics API is now live! For the first time, you have the ability to pull mobile golden signals into tools outside of our platform. This opens up a whole new world of analysis capabilities, such as linking different data sources, viewing key mobile metrics alongside other signals, and connecting the dots between formerly siloed information for a better understanding of your app’s health and performance.

Mobile observability signals wherever you work

Embrace is an observability solution built specifically for mobile. We capture a breadth of industry-leading device and OS-specific data points on your app’s performance.

Customers rely on Embrace to view their app’s mobile health stats, set alerts, and rapidly understand and resolve issues. With our new Metrics API, you can access Embrace data outside our platform in two new ways:

  1. Pull in critical metrics (“golden signals,” more on those below) into your own data ecosystems.
  2. Write queries against these metrics for quick analysis wherever you need this data.

This not only gives you more control and flexibility in how you can use your mobile app data, but it makes that data work harder for you by facilitating new ways to glean insights.

With the Embrace Metrics API, you can…

Get a better understanding of your app’s usage patterns

View device diagnostics alongside user analytics to get a deeper understanding of how people are interacting with your app. Are users altering their behavior on the app to compensate for bugs or crashes? How does this impact their user journey, their satisfaction, or their value to your business?

Save time analyzing large-scale data via queries

The Embrace Metrics API allows for querying mobile signals using PromQL, a well-documented query language. Use it to perform calculations on your data points as you pull them, and generate insights in real time. Say goodbye to the tedious process of exporting and manipulating spreadsheets – use that time to solve problems and build new features instead.

Ship better releases with our data guiding your CI/CD pipeline

Pull metrics into your CI/CD pipeline using our Metrics API. Validate app release state and gate releases using best-in-class mobile data. Deliver higher quality code, faster.

Get end-to-end visibility into your app’s health

Aggregate mobile metrics alongside existing infrastructure monitoring with our Metrics API. Track the full observability system without sacrificing best-of-breed tools for their unique benefit, and set up alerts using different data sources across mobile and backend to better manage incidents.

A look under the hood

As outlined above, we built the Embrace Metrics API with a number of clear benefits in mind for our customers. This required using a versatile data model, well-thought-out architecture, and an easy-to-pick-up query language that could serve as many use cases as possible.

Meet Prometheus

To do this, we emulated a standard that many of our customers, and much of the industry, were already used to – Prometheus.

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring toolkit that works seamlessly with many different tech stacks. It collects and stores metrics as time series data, a simple and intuitive data model that indexes individual points in time order. It also provides a query language called PromQL. We utilized this pre-built system to make our Metrics API as versatile and accessible as possible, modeling Embrace’s metrics endpoint off Prometheus APIs, thereby ensuring you can query our system using PromQL.

Why PromQL, you might ask? This pre-built query language offers a number of benefits that make it a clear winner for our Metrics API:

  • It’s well-documented.
  • It’s used by other time series monitoring systems like VictoriaMetrics and Thanos, meaning many new and existing customers will already be familiar with it.
  • It can aggregate queries from disparate sources.
  • It can perform arithmetic operations on the data.

Query your data with PromQL:

sum(hourly_sessions_total){app_id="abcd", os_version="1.2.3"}) by (app_version)

 

Since our Metrics API utilizes Prometheus’ data model and query language, it can be utilized with any system that’s compatible with Prometheus. AWS, for example, has a managed service for Prometheus, as does Microsoft Azure. The most well-known, however, is probably Grafana. Among other services, Grafana provides best-in-class data visualization for Prometheus metrics in the form of intuitive dashboards. Embrace has partnered with Grafana to make the analysis of your mobile signals as easy as possible – just use one of our pre-built dashboard templates and you’ll be ready to work with your data immediately (jump ahead to our “Getting Started” section below for more on this).

A two-pronged architecture

This first release of our API consists of two main components, the API gateway and the Metrics API.

The API gateway is the mechanism closest to the end user and, as the name suggests, serves as an intermediary between the client and the backend services actually pulling the data. It provides key functionality around not only request routing, caching, and rate limiting, but also critical features like security, authentication, and authorization. In terms of the latter, the API supports both login (SSO/Non-SSO) and API tokens, and also provides plug-in support for third-party authentication modules.

The Metrics API represents the data services arm of the architecture and is responsible for actually serving up time series data by interpreting the PromQL queries a customer makes of our system.

Metrics details – golden signals and more

Embrace captures comprehensive data about your mobile app’s performance. Our goal is to make as much of that available via the Metrics API as possible as we continue to evolve this product. With this first release, we’re making a number of “golden signals” available to start with. These are the critical health metrics that matter the most in evaluating your app’s health and managing incidents, and they include:

  • Sessions total
  • Crashes
  • Crashed user number
  • Crashed session rate

All of these golden signals can be filtered by app version, OS version, and device model. In terms of time rollups, they can be grouped by hourly or daily intervals.

Use the Metrics API to compare total sessions by app release version over time.

V1 limitations and future support

As the Embrace Metrics API evolves, we’ll be offering support for pulling more data beyond the golden signals. These include custom metrics and rollups, as well as querying our key activity metrics, which we call “moments”.

To learn more about our Metrics API – including current and future capabilities – head over to our docs.

Getting started

If you’re new to Embrace, you’ll need to download the SDK and instrument your app first – click here to get started.

Customers who are up and running with Embrace will get an authorization token for querying data from our backend. We’ll also provide a starter Grafana dashboard with pre-built queries to get you going with our Metrics API.

For those new to Grafana, this tool is a great way to visualize data from multiple different sources in one intuitive dashboard. V1 of our API supports Grafana out-of-the-box, so we recommend using it to start working with your data.

Embrace Metrics API queries as seen in Grafana

Being able to pull metrics into your own data ecosystem is a key benefit of the Embrace Metrics API, so your options are not limited to Grafana. You can query the API with any client library that supports Prometheus and the PromQL functionality, making integration with your software simple.

Ready to try it out for yourself? Request a demo or get started for free with Embrace.