Grafana Labs and Embrace, a provider of a platform for troubleshooting mobile applications, this week extended their alliance to include integration with Grafana Cloud. Previously, Embrace provided a plug-in for the open-source Grafana visualization tool but is now also providing integrations with the Grafana Cloud observability platform.
Andrew Tunall, chief product officer for Embrace, said the goal is to make it simpler for DevOps teams to work more closely with application development teams that specifically manage the building and deployment of mobile computing applications. That’s critical because most of the visibility that DevOps teams have today is limited to the application programming interfaces (APIs) that are deployed at the edge of the data center, he added.
The software development kits (SDKs) provided by Embrace are based on OpenTelemetry, open-source agent software that is being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). DevOps teams that have deployed Grafana Cloud can leverage Embrace’s tracing capabilities to gain deep, fine-grained insights into, for example, networking issues or session events via Embrace’s real user monitoring (RUM) tools.
DevOps teams will now be able to better track service level objectives all the way out to the network edge where mobile applications are deployed, noted Tunall.
It’s not clear to what degree the management of applications is being consolidated under a single DevOps team. However, many organizations have dedicated mobile application engineering teams dedicated to optimizing user experiences. The challenge those teams face is that the performance of mobile applications is often dependent on backend services that DevOps teams manage. As a result, there is a pressing need for these teams to collaborate. Many organizations are starting to embrace platform engineering as a methodology for consistently applying a set of best DevOps practices at scale.
Regardless of approach, the one certain thing is the number of mobile applications being built and deployed in the age of digital business transformation is going to increase. Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI) it should become simpler to build and deploy these applications. The issue, of course, is that the end users of mobile applications are not especially tolerant of glitches, so in many cases, any kind of disruption can result in end users simply switching over to a rival application that only takes a few minutes to install.
Hopefully, advances in AI will also make it simpler to deploy and troubleshoot mobile applications. In the meantime, however, DevOps teams will need to find ways to extend the reach of their existing DevOps platforms to support mobile applications that might not have been originally built or deployed via their pipelines. At this point, it’s not uncommon for many organizations to now find themselves supporting more mobile applications than they do traditional Web or desktop applications. As the number of mobile applications being deployed continues to steadily increase, it’s only a matter of time before there are more of them running in production environments than almost any other kind of application.
