Facebook today introduced the first major update to its App Insights product, aiming to help developers better understand how users interact with their apps. Currently in beta, App Insights 2.0 features a new design, actionable data, improved reliability, among other improvements. You can try it now by going to your App Insights overview page and clicking “try the new App Insights.”
First up, App Insights has been redesigned around how your apps integrate with Facebook as opposed to how users interact with Facebook. The new Overview dashboard, for example, shows the most important metrics for common functionality like Login and Sharing, and details are just a click away:
Next, Facebook says it has reorganized all the data you need to make a decision into a single location. For example, there is now a single dashboard which tells you how much traffic you receive from Facebook, whether it’s coming from Open Graph stories or Requests:
Furthermore, you can now compare key metrics for your app to those for other apps (Facebook promises metrics are aggregated and anonymized). This lets you figure out if changes you see are isolated to your app or if there is a trend that is happening across all apps.
Last but certainly not least, Facebook says it performed a comprehensive audit of its data sources and logging to “significantly improve the quality and reliability of the data.” The company further says metrics that come from mobile on Android and iOS have received a big bump in particular.
App Insights will also now display warnings on dashboards when there is an outage or a known issue with the data. It’s not safe to assume that the data is accurate if you don’t see a warning, especially while version 2.0 is still in beta, but at least when you see a warning you’ll know something is up.
Facebook will continue to support the App Insights 1.0 product as the default option until Insights 2.0 gets all the features from the previous version, several new features (the company didn’t offer details), and becomes more stable overall. The company wouldn’t give a final release date, saying only that process will take “several months.”
Top Image Credit: Kevin Krejci/Flickr
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