Introduction

When you release your app to the store and people around the world start using it, you will soon find out that there are some odd bugs people are experiencing and it’s not easy to have a full picture of what might be going wrong. It can be easy to fix a crash from crash logs. But what if a feature is just not working and you’re out of ideas of what could be happening and the only thing you can think of is “I wish I could just debug the app on this user’s phone” which of course is rarely achievable.

This module covers the basic concepts of App Observability (App Telemetry) which allows you to gather insights - possibly in real-time - on how your application is performing on users’ devices around the world, how to collect performance information on how well/fast your app is working, especially with different network conditions that users can’t experience. When a failure happens, what was going on before that led to that failure.

You can always use debug logs to understand this, but how many logs can you realistically review at once? A dozen a day? If you have thousands of people using your app, you need to have an overall idea how your app is performing now.

This course introduces OpenTelemetry on iOS, and the concepts it covers from the usage of Spans and understanding how long different operations happen on your app, like how long did it take from the user tapping a button, to the app showing the new screen, and what happened in between?

You’ll setup your Grafana dashboard to visualize OpenTelemetry data. Then you’ll integrate OpenTelemetry with your application to collect your first app metrics.

In this lesson you’ll learn:

• What is Grafana
• How to visualize OpenTelemetry data in Grafana
• Integrate OpenTelemetry with your iOS application
• Collect your first app metrics