Firebase Performance Monitoring

Gain insight into your app's performance issues.

Firebase Performance Monitoring is a service that helps you to gain insight into the performance characteristics of your Apple, Android, and web apps.

You use the Performance Monitoring SDK to collect performance data from your app, then review and analyze that data in the Firebase console. Performance Monitoring helps you to understand in real time where the performance of your app can be improved so that you can use that information to fix performance issues.

Apple platforms Android Web

Flutter

Key capabilities

Automatically measure app startup time, HTTP network requests, and more When you integrate the Performance Monitoring SDK into your app, you don't need to write any code before your app starts automatically monitoring several critical aspects of performance.
For native apps, the SDK logs startup time, rendering data by screen, and activity while in the foreground or background. For web apps, the SDK logs aspects like first contentful paint, ability for users to interact with your app, and more.
Gain insight into situations where app performance could be improved Optimizing the performance of your app can be challenging when you don't know exactly why it is falling short of user expectations. That's why Performance Monitoring lets you see performance metrics broken down by attributes, like country, device, app version, and OS level.
Customize monitoring for your app You can instrument custom code traces to capture your app's performance in specific situations, like when you load a new screen or display a new interactive feature. And, you can create custom metrics on these custom code traces to count events that you define (like cache hits) during those traces.
Identify significant changes in app performance Identifying and resolving major app performance issues, like network outages, is vital to the success of your app. Performance Monitoring lets you set up and customize alerts for the most critical parts of your app so you can see and respond to performance pitfalls – before they affect your users.

How does it work?

When you add the Performance Monitoring SDK, Firebase automatically starts collecting data for several common processes in your app, for example:

Performance Monitoring uses traces to collect data about these processes. A trace is a report that contains data captured between two points in time in your app.

The collected performance data for each trace are called metrics and vary depending on the type of trace. For example, when an instance of your app issues a network request, the trace collects metrics that are important for network request monitoring, like response time and payload size.

Each time an instance of your app runs a monitored process, the associated trace also automatically collects attributes data for that app instance. For example, if an Android app issues a network request, the trace collects the device, app version, and other attributes for that specific app instance. You can use these attributes to filter your performance data and learn if specific user segments are experiencing issues.

The out-of-the-box traces from Performance Monitoring get you started with monitoring your app, but to learn about the performance of specific tasks or flows, try out instrumenting your own custom traces of code in your app.

Implementation path

Add the Performance Monitoring SDK to your app You can add the Performance Monitoring SDK to your app, along with any other Firebase products that you want to use in your app.
Apple platforms | Android | Web | Flutter
(Optional)
Instrument custom code traces and custom metrics in your app
Using the Performance Monitoring SDK, you can instrument custom code traces and custom metrics to measure specific aspects of your app's performance.
Monitor performance data in the console in real time In the Firebase console, you can monitor performance data from your users to learn the specific situations where your app's performance could be improved. You can also break down the performance data by attributes, like app version, country, device, or OS.

User data

Performance Monitoring does not permanently store any personally identifiable information (such as names, email addresses, or phone numbers). While monitoring HTTP network requests, Performance Monitoring uses URLs (not including URL parameters) to build aggregated and anonymous URL patterns that are eventually persisted and shown in the Firebase console.

For more details, refer to the Examples of information collected by Performance Monitoring.

Next steps