Using App Metrics

This section covers how to use App metrics to analyze how different activities contribute to your app's total workload over a given period of time

You can think of workload as the sum of all the work performed by a variety of activity types.

The App metrics dashboard gives an overview and a detailed view of your app's workload and what contributes to it.

The App Metrics dashboard gives you several visualizations of the work that your app is doing. The charts serve two purposes:

• To give you an overview of your app’s total workload

• To give you an easy way to drill down into each activity and get a granular view of how single workflows and expressions contribute

We are working on expanding the current App metrics to be able to drill down on even more granular data, as well as increasing its performance.

Total workload

The bar graph helps you get a transparent view of how much app your work is doing in total, and at what times. This visualization lets you see trends and patterns in your app's workload usage over time, which can help you plan and make more informed decisions about future upgrades or changes to your app.

The total workload usage chart breaks your total workload into days and hours.

Each column in the bar graph represents one day, going back 30 days from the current date by default. This example above is from a complex app that processes thousands of users, searches and workflows.

Changing the time frame

To drill down into an individual day, simply click that day in the chart. Let’s look at March 20th when the workload was a bit higher:

Clicking on a day zooms the chart in on that day and presents the hourly consumption.

Here we can see that something happened at 10:00 am that added more to the workload of that day than the rest: this lets you zoom in more closely in time and get an understanding of what exactly happened between 10:00 am and 11:00 am that gave Bubble more work to do.

The App metrics will reflect the time zone of the device that is accessing them.

Isolating the timeframe extends down to the granular pie chart below, which lets you identify activity types on the top level and drill down into individual workflows and expressions to see what they are doing.

Granular view

The granular view gives you a pie chart where each slice represents one of the activity types that we track. This way, you get an understanding of the types of processes that contribute the most.

Let’s look at an example:

The granular pie chart presents a list of the activities that contribute the most in total. Clicking in the chart zooms in on that activity type.

In the chart above we can see clearly that three activities make up the majority of the work that this app performs:

• Fetching data

• Workflows

• Data trigger workflows

This data alone can already tell us something about how the app is built: fetching data (which relates to searches and other ways that information is being fetched from the database) makes up a large bulk of the workload consumed. A large part is also made up of workflows; this activity type covers workflows that happen on the page. Thirdly, we can see that database trigger event workflows consume about 10% of the total capacity. We can see that percentage by hovering over the sector in the pie chart.

Drilling down

Clicking on each of these activity types provides an even more detailed view of individual instances of that activity type, and how much each one contributes to its total. Let’s click on the Workflow sector to dig deeper:

Hovering one of the sectors in the pie chart shows you the percentage that particular workflow contributed in the selected time frame.

Now we are down to a list of individual workflows. In this example, the workflows have generic names to illustrate, but in your app the names will reflect the labels you have provided in the workflow editor.

The example shown above uses generic names to provide an illustration, but in your app, the names will reflect the labels you have given in the workflow editor.

By again hovering the mouse over the top workflow, we can see that one Make changes to a thing workflow alone makes up more than 15% of the total workload in the Workflow activity type.

One more click on that sector in the chart takes us directly to the workflow and action where the work is done.

Clicking in a vector in the pie chart takes us directly to the workflow in the workflow tab.

This way of continually drilling down in the chart can teach us a lot about where the work happens and where we can potentially make adjustments to make the app more efficient.

This not only helps you keep your app operating at a cost-effective level, but it can also speed up processes to improve the overall experience for users.

Excluding details

As you research your app’s workload, it can sometimes be useful to see what the chart looks like if we exclude some information. For example, if you want to stop focusing on workflows, you can hide that information in the chart by clicking on that activity type in the right-hand list.

Let’s hide the Workflow activity type to focus on the others:

As you can see, when we click on the Workflows entry in the list, it becomes crossed out, and the chart is updated to exclude it: the dark blue slice is no longer visible.

Checking specific workload units consumed in the logs

Using the Server logs tab, you can check the workload charged for each action, as well as the total for each workflow.

Using the data

Creating efficient applications is a process of continuous improvement. Using the App Metrics dashboard is an effective method for recognizing the processes that have the greatest impact on your app’s workload. As you analyze your workload data, you will discover that some activities are essential for your app to operate, while others can be optimized.

The flexibility of Bubble’s platform opens up to different ways of solving the same problem, and sometimes small changes can lead to great improvements in efficiency.