Monitoring your Xamarin mobile applications

In this tutorial I am going to explain why monitoring your application is critical. This tutorial will be followed by 2 others to present 2 plugins for monitoring your applications.

Why monitoring?

When developing an application, we might encounter bugs and potential crashes of the application. This is not a good user experience, which results in:

• Unhappy users
• Bad comments in the differents stores
• Your users will delete your application from their devices

Furthermore, you won’t be able to correct all the bugs and crashes without any stack traces or logs.

So what can we do?

The idea is to find a solution to be notified when users have an issue on their device, with enough information to reproduce and correct the bugs.

Different solutions exists to collect logs

Packages like NLog can log data directly on the device but the files require to be retreived manually to the developers. This solution is efficient when working with a customer that sends all the logs to you. On the other hand, it’s more difficult to ask a user from a public store to send you the logs in case of a crash.

With that in mind, we need to use a tool that can send the logs automatically from the user device directly to the developers. The solution I really like to achieve that is App Center!

App Center is a Microsoft online tool that works for Xamarin but also for native applications, it’s easy to setup and simple to use.

Using this tool increase the maintainability of your application. So what are you waiting for?

Let’s see these solutions in actions!

Now, I will show you how to setup and reuse these tools through the following two tutorials:

Monitoring your Xamarin application using NLog

Monitoring your Xamarin application with App Center

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