An iOS and Android mobile app is run through an Aternity app, or Web service, that analyzes and configures the app code. Aternity injects JavaScript into the app in order to collect data from it. No changes are made to the application logic and developers don't have to add monitoring tags. "We can see the key events that describe a transaction, a click event or an update event, for example," says Matz. The events can be linked together and given a name, and this single sequence can then be monitored and analyzed.

The apps and analytics are configured and managed from a management portal, a Web interface currently in Adobe Flash but "soon in HTML5," says Matz.

Using the portal, an administrator can click on an app, see the activities related to it, see color-coded performance summaries for each activity, and drill down into real-time analytics information for more details. The software can compare the event and transaction metrics against a baseline, and then alert the administrator when it detects performance problems. A suite of tools can help identify the problem, probe for root causes, and fix it.

Clicking on "host resources" shows a range of features and services used by the client app: Wi-Fi signal strength, transmit speeds, mobile CPU load, available local memory and even battery level.

Critically, Aternity MFPI then correlates all this data and these variables, allowing an administrator to determine that an email slowdown is caused by large files, not a weak Wi-Fi signal; or that one app is much more demanding of the battery, and alerting the user to use caution or recharge.