AppPulse Suite [EOL] Reviews

We use AppPulse to look at two of our most important applications. Our contact centers that take calls from our customers, and our website that our customers use to pay bills online, etc.

We have a lot of quick wins. I call them quick because AppPulse has only been in the environment for a short time. We've been able to find misconfigured network segments, we've been able to find data we've never had before, like our logo transfer from our content delivery network, and how long it took to move over. We've found issues around daylight's savings time, and customer portals that we probably would not have found on our own without AppPulse.

For me, it was the speed in which we were able to deploy it. We bought AppPulse, and within a week we were able to have it fully integrated with our existing applications and have it monitoring them. It was just a really fast ROI. The speed that you can get AppPulse out there was the brightest spot of this whole process.

We typically lean more towards on-premise solutions for a host of reasons, so we had some trepidation about going into the cloud and a SaaS offerings. There was some leeriness around that, but it's been a very pleasant experience. It lowers my total cost of ownership, so that would have been one of the scarier points, but now I would tell colleagues that it's not something to worry about. It's done very well.

We've had a very quick return on our investment as far as being able to monitor applications that we hadn't been able to monitor before, and then able to catch problems that we previously had not been able to catch. For example, with the way we have AppPulse deployed, we were able to catch a problem at a particular call center where the application was running roughly 10 times slower than other call center sites. We were able to catch that and help remediate that. It affected a lot of call takers with very slow-running application and we were able to help resolve that quickly.

AppPulse Active allows us to very quickly produce synthetic monitoring for our applications, for some applications we've never been able to monitor before, some older Legacy applications. It gave us a set of tools that we could use to create the transactions and to play them back flawlessly on applications that we previous hadn't been able to. It was very quick.

It can monitor multiple types of applications. We monitor an old client server app, our mobile application, our external-facing web application, and internal sites that we use, like Skype for Business. Very quick and easy, and covers a big breadth of applications that we can monitor. It's very important to us because we're a regulated utility and we're required to have certain response times to calls from our customers.

One of the applications we're monitoring through AppPulse is our call center application. We want to make sure it's performing well and available so those numbers are good and we're in compliance with the regulations from our governing bodies, from the commissions. That's extremely important to us. We need to know our applications are performing and performing well.

For our external-facing websites, it's not regulatory-bound, but our customers are getting to demand better performance as they use other people's websites, they buy stuff from big sites such as from Amazon. They expect our site to perform equally as well. Also, if our site performs well, some basic questions could be answered online saving on calls. We need to be able to do that on our website to keep our call center volume down. It's all about keeping the customers happy and making sure that we're in compliance with our regulatory bodies.

You can test your app all day long. If you don’t know where to search and on what device, you will lose precious time. We launched the Take It app in France last June, and we had 10,000 active users. Five percent of our users experienced crashes, so we decided to add AppPulse Mobile to our app, and crashes dropped from five to 0.44 percent. During the same time period, our users jumped to 120,000.

Another example, Take It is a social photo sharing app, and we noticed that some of our users needed more than 20 seconds to upload a photo, and we were losing customers who were also leaving poor reviews. Through AppPulse Mobile, we were able to identify this issue and address it. Now, our app takes only two seconds to upload a photo and the UX is much stronger.

It took me less than 30 minutes to integrate it, with no additional development needed. As a start-up, that’s really important because everyone is doing five jobs. Before AppPulse Mobile, we used Google Analytics, but we didn’t have a global vision.

With Google Analytics, you choose what performance metrics you want to have reported, but with AppPulse Mobile, you have a global vision of what is really happening inside your app.

With software development you want to use the analytics to drive the development roadmap - with this solution we have that capability.

The first thing that really turned me onto AppPulse Mobile was that they had a tag list, which can instantly capture all of the data that end users were creating by interacting with our app, without having to write a single line of code.

We learned within 24 hours that users were spending 43 seconds on the registration page and 53% were leaving before registration. We had not known this for years, and after we stopped development initiatives, and started using single sign-on, we got the registration down to two seconds, a five-fold increase, and increased completion to 98%.

This was a big improvement because people don’t want to sign up for something new. As soon as we found out the issue, we instantly saw an increase in stars and number of downloads. When we first started the analytics, we had a .4% conversion rate from the free version to the paid one, and after about a year a 1.15% conversion from free to paid, an additional 4% up-sell.

What we learned is that the analytics are more important than the app itself. If you don’t know what users are experiencing, it's like driving at night with no lights, and you can't make the most calculated decisions without the full developer roadmap. It also helps us align the developer road cycle, identify the user experience ahead of ego, etc.

It really gives us the feedback in order to be sure that we have built and tested apps appropriately. These are the apps that we are releasing to our public domain or internal user.

We collect data about the user experience with real life data. This does not come from the testing part, but rather from the user part. We want to be sure that what we have tested and designed is really used as expected by the user.

We can collect data about the user experience and see how the user is behaving with the app, or check the behavior of the app itself. This is done in the context of the device that we are targeting.

It is interesting to check if the app is well-designed regarding the user's expectations. For example, we check if we have too much data transfer, or if the consumption of the battery is okay. We take into account the number of actions that you being done.

There are two levels of feedback coming from the solution. One is the user experience, which is really important. The other part is the design regarding the usage of this app in real life.

I'm working with a pharmaceutical company and that means that we have to instrument the app. This is a little bit similar to "big brother". In the context of a medical collection of information, we are facing some issues about regulation for data privacy. For example, localization is quite a sensitive issue for us. We are using AppPulse, but not as extensively as we expected, due to the limitations and the regulations that we have to meet.

We provide software testing services to third-party organizations with HP AppPulse. You can see the real user experience live. We can see if our users are experiencing low UI performance, stability problems, or high resource consumption on one screen. 

We had a client with a lot of crashes and we were able to show them how many users were suffering from crashes and which user action was causing the most crashes. This helped us focus on what they needed to fix from the developer side to quickly improve the user experience. It gave us VIP access to app behavior.

To fix a crash we need to know the root cause. The detailed log is sent frequently to the developer to help improve the next version. I've worked with developers before, but since using HP AppPulse, we work together to provide the client with the best validation possible.

The service also features FunDex, which is a score related to how enjoyable the application is to use. The score starts at 100 and an app loses points for various transgressions, such as crashes and sluggish performance. Developers can drill down and see how and why various points are being lost from their app’s score.

We only get one chance to make a good first impression, so let's make sure our app launches quickly.

We need to be able to measure mobile apps' performance, stability, and resource usage, and focus on the most important issue and then improve them. I think that the valuable features of this product include:

• Stability overview with crash analytics.
• The FunDex scores gives me an overview of user experience in a very clear rating format.
• Helps me see the health of our applications.
• Launch time performance analysis.
• User action response time.
• Crash Trail.
• I can drill down to the root cause and see how UI performance, stability and resource usage is affecting the customer experience.

In order to provide our user with a unique experience, we have committed ourselves to give a fast, reliable, and error-free application that are monitored and updated regularly.

A good user experience consists with a fast app launch, continues with a catchy UI and easy booking flow without any delays and crashes.

We adapted the product into the development lifecycle and adopted it across our key UI and development teams. We improved the product stability and performance, as well as the user perspective, and can now see why, and how many, customers experience bad applications during launch time. Then, we can redesign the product so it will be improved for a smoother, nicer appearance when our users next start the application.

This product has many valuable features. It is very important for us to identify the response time, identify the different operating systems, the brand of the smart phones, and where customers are using them - not only in Mexico, but in different parts of the world.

Another feature that is very important for us is that it identifies transactions and flows of the operations that our customers use with our mobile application. We can improve the tool to make it faster and more adaptive to the needs of our customers.

I think they can improve the feature that identifies the operating systems, the brand of the devices, the response time, geolocalization. Security is also important because we also use Fortify, another HP tool, to identify whether there is any security breach.