The 5 best tracking tools for testing and monitoring your web and mobile applications

The performance and reliability of web and mobile applications are essential to guarantee an optimal user experience.

However, a crucial issue is that even a well-designed application can encounter performance problems, crash unexpectedly or slow down under real-life conditions.

The beauty of tracking tools is that they allow you to test and monitor your applications, so you can detect bugs early and prevent small problems from turning into disasters.

In this article, we present the 5 best tracking tools for testing and monitoring your web and mobile applications, detailing their features, advantages and disadvantages to help you choose the tool best suited to your needs.

1. Mr Suricate - French leader in automated no-code testing

Mr Suricate is a French solution specializing in test automation to ensure the quality of web and mobile applications.

Thanks to its no-code approach enhanced by artificial intelligence, Mr Suricate offers companies an all-in-one testing and monitoring platform, easy to use even for non-technical profiles.

The tool stands out for its cross-platform versatility, enabling applications to be tested on different environments to guarantee optimum user experience. Its proactive anomaly detection system reproduces user journeys at regular intervals, quickly identifying bugs before they affect production.

Mr Suricate integrates easily into existing IT ecosystems and works with numerous third-party tools, facilitating centralized test management.

Its intuitive interface enables real-time visualization of application performance via customizable dashboards, providing greater visibility of key indicators.

In the event of an incident, the tool sends alerts in real time, enabling technical teams to intervene rapidly to maintain service availability and reliability. 

Key benefits of Mr Suricate

✅ No-code solution accessible to non-technical teams.
✅ Widget-based dashboards with advanced custom alerts.
✅ Continuous monitoring to detect anomalies in real time.
✅ Multi-platform testing (web, mobile, API).
✅ Responsive customer support and customized coaching.
✅ Reversibility plan available for open source platforms.
✅ Fixed price each month.

Disadvantages

❌ Customization limitations for more experienced testers looking for additional features.
❌ Does not support testing related to network infrastructure or non-browser-based applications.

2. Dynatrace - AI for application monitoring 

Dynatrace is a monitoring platform based on artificial intelligence (AI), offering solutions including modules for application observability and security, digital experience, infrastructure and automation.

The platform is particularly well known for its analytics tool, Grail, which collects large-scale causal data and delivers AI-powered insights with full context taken into account for better decision-making.

Dynatrace also lets you configure targeted notifications so that the most qualified personnel are alerted in the event of a problem.

Key benefits

✅ Built-in AI to automatically analyze and detect problems.
✅ Full-stack monitoring (applications, infrastructure, users).
✅ Automatic mapping of dependencies between services.
✅ Targeted notifications.
✅ Supports BizDevOps with BI tools.
✅ Large-scale causal data processing.

Disadvantages 

❌ Complexity of implementation.
❌ High cost, especially for large infrastructures.
❌ Limited in terms of support.

3. Datadog - the versatile tool for cloud monitoring

Datadog is a unified cloud monitoring platform, offering complete visibility of application, infrastructure and log performance. Designed for DevOps teams and IT engineers, it lets you analyze systems in real time and optimize their reliability.

The platform stands out for its advanced monitoring features, including server, database and service performance monitoring, as well as real-time user behavior analysis. It also integrates over 400 technologies and services, making it easy to deploy in a variety of environments.

Datadog also offers advanced tools for digital experience management, such as session recording and playback, error tracking and real-time monitoring of real and synthetic users.

Key benefits

✅ Intuitive interface with customizable dashboards.
✅ Easy integration with over 400 services and tools.
✅ Advanced alerting tools to anticipate and prevent incidents.
✅ In-depth log analysis for optimal traceability and observability.

Disadvantages

❌ High pricing.
❌ Can generate too many alerts if misconfigured.
❌ Relatively steep learning curve, requiring time for complete mastery.
❌ Limited documentation, which can complicate adoption and configuration.

4. New Relic: next-generation observability

New Relic is an observability platform that provides engineers and data scientists with crucial data for detecting problems in the pre-production environment, identifying anomalies before they go into production, and triggering immediate alerts.

This tracking tool stands out for its Errors Inbox tool, a full-stack error management solution that groups errors by importance and sends targeted notifications to the teams concerned, notably via Slack.

New Relic also retains the history of errors even after they have been resolved, providing access to contextual information, attachments and comments for comprehensive post-mortem analysis and better tracking of interventions.

Key benefits

✅ Compatible with many languages and frameworks.
✅ In-depth analysis of application performance.
✅ Precise diagnostic tools to identify bottlenecks.
✅ Intuitive interface with detailed reports.
✅ Error storage and management for efficient tracking.
✅ Targeted notifications in the event of errors.
✅ Intelligent error grouping for faster resolution.

Disadvantages

❌ Can be resource-hungry, impacting the performance of monitored applications.
❌ Dense interface, requiring some adaptation time.
❌ High cost, which can become onerous depending on usage.
❌ Large number of features, which can be confusing for new users.

5. Grafana: the open-source reference for data visualization

Grafana is an open-source tool specialized in data visualization and analysis. It is used to analyze metrics from multiple data sources, offering a flexible solution for full-stack monitoring.

Complementary Grafana tools can be integrated for in-depth monitoring of back-end and front-end performance, with real-time data collection on logs, metrics and events.

As an open-source project, Grafana lets you add your own features, and offers an interactive demo with no need for prior commercial contact. 

Key benefits

✅ Free and open-source.
✅ Customizable dashboards.
✅ Integration with numerous tools such as Prometheus, InfluxDB and Elasticsearch.
✅ Active community and wide choice of extensions.
✅ Interactive online demo accessible without registration.

Disadvantages

❌ Needs to be coupled with other tools for a complete monitoring solution.
❌ Advanced configuration required to fully exploit its features.
❌ Requires in-depth technical expertise for optimal use.
❌ Logs are not stored natively, requiring an external solution.

Test Mr Suricate | no-code, multi-browser, multi-device surveillance

The great added value of Mr Suricate is to combine its SaaS solution with a quality service, enabling a non-IT specialist to become a tester in less than a month.

With Mr Suricateyou don't need to know how to code or spend a fortune to make sure your users have a smooth and bug-free browsing experience, no matter how they access it!