Get started with Performance Monitoring for Flutter

This quickstart describes how to set up Firebase Performance Monitoring to help you to gain insight into the performance characteristics of your Flutter apps.

Before you begin

If you haven't already, configure and initialize Firebase in your Flutter project.

Step 1: Add Performance Monitoring to your app

  1. From the root directory of your Flutter project, run the following command to install the Performance Monitoring Flutter plugin:

    flutter pub add firebase_performance

  2. From the root directory of your Flutter project, run the following command:

    flutterfire configure

    Running this command ensures that your Flutter app's Firebase configuration is up-to-date and, for Android, adds the required Performance Monitoring Gradle plugin to your app.

  3. Once complete, rebuild your Flutter project:

    flutter run

After you've added the Performance Monitoring SDK, Firebase automatically starts collecting data related to your app's lifecycle (like app start time), and data for HTTP/S network requests.

On Flutter, automatic screen rendering performance monitoring is not possible for individual Flutter screens. A single view controller encapsulates your entire Flutter application natively so the underlying native Firebase SDK is not aware of screen transitions.

Step 2: Generate performance events for initial data display

Firebase starts processing the events when you successfully add the SDK to your app. If you're still developing locally, interact with your app to generate events for initial data collection and processing.

  1. Continue to develop your app using a simulator or test device.

  2. Generate events by switching your app between background and foreground several times, interacting with your app by navigating across screens, and/or triggering network requests.

  3. Go to the Performance dashboard of the Firebase console. You should see your initial data display within a few minutes.

    If you don't see a display of your initial data, review the troubleshooting tips.

Step 3: (Optional) View log messages for performance events

  1. Check your log messages for any error messages.

    Performance Monitoring tags its log messages with the following tags so that you can filter your log messages:

    • iOS+: Firebase/Performance
    • Android: FirebasePerformance

  2. Check for the following types of logs which indicate that Performance Monitoring is logging performance events:

    • Logging trace metric: TRACE_NAME, FIREBASE_PERFORMANCE_CONSOLE_URL
    • Logging network request trace: URL

  3. Click on the URL to view your data in the Firebase console. It may take a few moments for the data to update in the dashboard.

Step 4: (Optional) Add custom monitoring for specific code

To monitor performance data associated with specific code in your app, you can instrument custom code traces.

With a custom code trace, you can measure how long it takes your app to complete a specific task or set of tasks, such as loading a set of images or querying your database. The default metric for a custom code trace is its duration, but you can also add custom metrics, such as cache hits and memory warnings.

In your code, you define the beginning and the end of a custom code trace (and add any desired custom metrics) using the API provided by the Performance Monitoring SDK.

Visit Add monitoring for specific code to learn more about these features and how to add them to your app.

Step 5: Deploy your app then review results

After you've validated Performance Monitoring using the an emulator and one or more test devices, you can deploy the updated version of your app to your users.

You can monitor performance data in the Performance dashboard of the Firebase console.

Next steps