Crittercism, a mobile app monitoring company, announced a new tool today called Transactions that lets customers monitor mobile apps and surface issues most critical to the business first.
Crittercism CEO Andrew Levy says up until now, the tool could tell you that there was a problem and how many people it was affecting, but he says that doesn’t always tell the whole story. Numbers alone can be misleading because it doesn’t connect the problem to what matters most to a business.
As an example, he says suppose 99 percent of users in a financial services app were having issues updating their profile, but one percent were having trouble transferring money. While numbers favor the first problem, the second problem is absolutely critical to what the business does and IT should be focusing on the problem that’s most important to the business first.
Levy says this can be revenue driven or it can involve accessing critical information on the company network from the field using a mobile device, or any number of issues, but whatever it is, the company can define the issues that matter most to them and  get alerts when something happens that has an impact on those critical activities.
“We have built it to let people define what attributes [they think are] important, what metrics they need to pay attention to. It’s a wide spread,” he explained.
In a growing monitoring market, Levy is careful to separate his company from other monitoring players out there, particularly New Relic and AppDynamics, which he says are more focused on monitoring server side activities, as opposed to what’s happening directly on the mobile device at a time when an app fails to work correctly.
Andy Vitus, a partner, Scale Venture Partners, which contributed to Crittercism’s $30M Series C funding in May says that difference caught the attention of his firm. “What got us excited is that there is a whole host of monitoring tools monitoring part of the infrastructure. What’s interesting about Crtittercism is that they have a mobile-first focus,” he said.
“We know New Relic and AppDynamics pretty well, and they are so focused on server side monitoring.” Vitus believes the mobile side will eventually get the attention of these companies as well, but he said he believes, Crittercism’s mobile focus gives them a clear head start.
Levy says his company is like a command and control center for mobile apps giving visibility into what’s happening to an app on a given device at any moment and insight into why it’s failing and if it’s important.
Crittercism is in fact part of a growing monitoring ecoystem that includes ScienceLogic (and others) in the datacenter and the previously mentioned New Relic and AppDynamics (and others) monitoring app performance on the server side. Just last week, TechCrunch reported on PagerDuty’s $27.2M in Series A funding, a product that all of these monitoring tools can plug into. It then processes alerts and informs IT when there is an issue that requires attention, regardless of which one triggered the alert.
Crittercism customers include major brands such as Netflix, PayPal, eBay, Groupon, Urban Outfitters, Pinterest, DocuSign and Sam’s Club. The company has garnered a total of $48.7M in funding to date. Funders include Google Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures, InterWest Partners and Accenture.
As Levy is quick to point out, the world is moving to mobile. He says Groupon reports 54 percent of their business is now on mobile devices as just one example. “You need to understand it from an operational perspective and how will it impact your business,” he says.
PHOTO CREDIT: (c) Can Stock Photo
