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Perspectives

Digital Intelligence Analytics for Devops

September 5, 2018 By: Adam Dille

DevOps isn’t necessarily a set of tools, but rather a cultural philosophy where silos are broken down between engineering teams to improve software quality and collaboration using digital intelligence analytics. We run a DevOps practice at Quantum Metric, and this means that our developers and operations engineers work very closely together across the entire product lifecycle to keep the platform fast and reliable.

Part of our DevOps culture includes “drinking our own champagne” to leverage Quantum Metric when we need to debug a product issue (and yes, like everyone else, we have these too). We use the Quantum Metric platform to get alerts, investigate issues, and file better bugs and enhancements for the product.

With Quantum-on-Quantum we respond faster by:

  1. Understanding the steps to reproduce the strange corner case that triggered the error
  2. Visualizing the user’s true experience by watching exactly where they went and what they did

These are the same benefits that our customers get too!

Unable to Reproduce

 “Unable to Reproduce”
– Ever marked a bug report with that “resolution”?

I actually started my career as a full stack developer before “full stack” was cool (#nerdcred). I wrote database queries, backend code and frontend code—I did it all!

Back in the day, solving issues on the frontend was a bit of a crap shoot. I remember spending days trying to track down a bug from the CEO’s friend—and we all know that the longer it takes to fix an issue, the greater the impact can be on the business. Of course, this friend didn’t give many details about the bug, his platform, or how he triggered the bug, just that “I tried to do X and this is the error I got. Screenshot attached.” I guess that’s better than most user-submitted tickets, but still…

Sure, I could have hoped that this frustrated user would have told me their OS and browser versions and also gave a detailed account of their steps to reproduce (yeah right!), but that’s hardly ever the case.

With such little information, I was grasping at straws. Server logs and Omniture metrics didn’t help at all, and my own attempts to reproduce the issue were coming up short. In the end, I went through the code, added as much bullet proofing as I could and got lucky because the issue seemed to “go away.” But I was always a little on edge because I didn’t know if I’d actually solved the problem.

Without seeing what the end-user saw, I was blind—session replay provides this visibility.

What Are They Doing?

 “But what is the user really doing?”
– My former APM customers

I eventually moved out of development (though I still dabble a little) and into a role where I could interact with end-users more regularly. I worked in traditional Network and Application Performance Monitoring before coming to the Digital Intelligence Analytics space with Quantum Metric. These former companies had great metrics around why an application was fast or slow, but little showing what the customer was actually doing on the page.

“An angry customer just emailed us about an error on the site. I know they went from Page A to B to C, but I can’t tell what they did there.” To me, it always seemed like a gap and didn’t really help fix the problem.

Again, those companies were blind to what the end-user was actually doing. Quantum Metric provides this visibility with session replay combined with digital intelligence analytics and performance metrics.

If a picture is worth 1,000 words… a replay is worth 1,000 pictures.

These stories above are partly why our customers use Quantum Metric. Imagine if you didn’t have to guess the user’s steps or their platform details but could see it all as clear as watching a movie. Imagine if you didn’t have to write lengthy paragraphs in bug or enhancement reports, but could instead say, “Watch this replay. What if we did X instead?”

With Quantum Metric, you can do exactly that.

From a DevOps perspective, Quantum Metric session replays fill this user experience gap. The platform allows our customers to:

See exactly what the end-user saw

session replay

Capture all relevant platform metrics

platform metrics

Investigate API- and page-level details

qm-page-details

Share the offending replay for better collaboration

share-replay-slack

And perform aggregate analysis across the entire user population to drive insights

qm-opportunities

 

Quantum Metric ultimately helps DevOps teams gain visibility into the user experience, so they can reduce the time spent identifying, reproducing and resolving errors. Are you ready to fill the digital intelligence analytics gap? Request a custom demo!

 

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