Embrace Feature Releases for 4/14/2021

We’re so excited to share our latest features and improvements to the Embrace dashboard!

In this update, we’ll give a walkthrough of our redesigned Crash Summary page and our new Crash Stats page. These updates give your team more actionable crash data for faster identification of regressions and better visibility into where crashes are disproportionately affecting subsets of your users.

Here’s what we’ll cover in this post:

The updated Crash Summary page
The new Crash Stats page

The Updated Crash Summary Page

The Crash Summary page provides aggregate data about the crashes in your mobile application. Your team can easily compare crash-free rates for sessions and users across releases, see crash distributions by device and OS, and see breakdowns for each crash type.

The following images are what you’ve previously had access to on the Crash Summary page.

While this information is incredibly helpful, we knew there was an opportunity to provide even more actionable information. Check out our updated Crash Summary page below!

Let’s dive into the improvements. Like before, you have access to your crash-free sessions and crash-free users rates with a visualization for the given time period. We’ve added a table with a breakdown of crash-free sessions by version so you can easily spot regressions across releases.

We’ve also included several new metrics into this widget:

Total crashes for all versions selected in the given time period
Users affected by crashes for all versions selected in the given time period
Visualization of crash counts by version over time
Breakdown of crash counts by version

These count metrics complement the percentages, providing another level of visibility to inform decision-making.

We’ve made a few adjustments to the Crashes List, most notably to the trend section for easier tracking of recent crash counts by type.

And of course, the update wouldn’t be complete without making the page now fully responsive.

The New Crash Stats Page

The Crash Stats page highlights where crashes are over-indexed on certain attributes. You navigate to it from the Crash Summary page by clicking the “Explore Crash Stats” button.

This type of data previously existed on the Crash Summary page in the Device and OS stats widgets. We’ve expanded the number of widgets, giving your team even more ways to spot actionable patterns in your crash data.

The widgets available are the following:

Device - This shows which device the crash happened on.
OS - This shows which OS the crash happened on.
Last Captured View - This shows which view/activity/fragment the user was on before the crash happened.
Time of Day (UTC) - This shows in which hour the crash happened. The time is given in UTC.
Session Property - This shows the session property key-value pairs from the crashed session.
Country - This shows the country where the crash happened.

Here’s a quick primer on how to interpret this information:

The blue line represents the proportion of total crashes that occurred with the given attribute.
The gray line represents the proportion of total sessions that occurred with the given attribute.

Large differences between the two lines indicate crashes being over- or under-indexed by that attribute. The following example highlights fairly big discrepancies between the relative numbers of crashes and sessions for the POS applications in different stores.

By hovering over the line, we see that 65.22% of crashes occur on devices at store #112, yet those devices only account for 40.34% of total sessions. In other words, far more crashes happen at that store than should, assuming that whether a device is at a given store or not does not affect its chance of crashing.

These visualizations provide context about where crashes might disproportionately affect subsets of your users. In extreme cases, crashes that overwhelmingly affect a given attribute can guide your team towards a possible root cause involving that attribute. In the above example, differences in network connectivity between the stores could be leading to increased crashes. By monitoring these deviations from expected behavior, your team can make more informed decisions when investigating issues.

And that’s it! With the updated Crash Summary page, you can now easily inspect crash counts and the number of users affected across versions. With the new Crash Stats page, you can examine where crashes are over-indexed across key attributes. These improvements result in better visibility into where crashes occur, what their impact is, and which users they affect.

We’re excited to see how these updates help your mobile teams! As always, please share any feedback so we can continue to build features and improvements that help your team be successful.

How Embrace Helps Mobile Teams

Embrace is an observability and debugging platform built for mobile teams. We are a comprehensive solution that fully reproduces every user experience from every single session. Your team gets the data it needs to proactively identify, prioritize, and solve any issue that’s costing you users or revenue.

Want to see how Embrace can help your team grow your mobile applications with best-in-class tooling and world-class support? Request a customized demo and see how we help teams set and exceed the KPIs that matter for their business!