View crash reports for mobile applications

Reviewing and fixing crashes is vital to improving your application's user experience. Dynatrace captures crashes and their stack traces so that you can assess the criticality of a crash and identify the root cause of the issue. With the crash-analysis workflow, you can see the impact of crashes, identify the affected user groups, and quickly get to the root cause. By proactively resolving issues, you can ensure that your applications consistently meet your business goals.

When working with a client-server setup, some crashes have their root cause on the server side. Dynatrace uses PurePath® technology and OneAgent® to correlate user actions with web requests, thereby giving you complete visibility, from individual user actions to the specific server-side database statements that contribute to crashes.

To view the basic information on crashes for your application

Go to Frontend.
Select the application you want to analyze.
From the application overview page, select the Crashes & Errors tile.

The Crashes & Errors tile shows the number of crash occurrences, percentage of crash-free users, and crash rate for the currently selected timeframe. The Crashes by version chart displays the total number of crashes by version for the currently selected timeframe.

Crashes tile on the application overview page

To access crash reports for your application

From your application overview page, select the Crashes & Errors tile.
Under the Crashes by version chart, select Analyze crashes. The Crash analysis page opens.

Crash analysis page

The Crash analysis page gives you an overview of all crash groups that occurred during the selected timeframe and allows you to focus on a range of properties and dimensions that might be specific to the crash pattern. Therefore, you can analyze crashes based on the operating system version, application version, user region, session duration, connectivity type, and other dimensions.

Latest app versions

The Latest app versions section provides crash information for four latest app versions. For each app version, you can check the percentage of crash-free users, number of affected users, and number of crashes per certain number of sessions.

Crash statistics

In the Crash statistics section, you can check the total crash count, number of crash groups, and number of affected versions for the currently selected timeframe. In the Latest app versions section, select Filter next to the version you're interested in to get this information for a particular version.

You can also use other filters, such as Connection type, Country, or Manufacturer.

Crash groups

Dynatrace groups crashes by similarity of the stack trace and occurrence in the source code. This usually also works across different versions of your application so that you can easily find out if a crash is still present in the latest release.

Crash group details page

Under Crash groups on the Crash analysis page, select a crash group you're interested in to access all crash instances. Filter them to investigate a particular part of the crash group.

Crash group information

On the crash group details page, select Next / previous crash occurrence Left and right arrows to browse through all the crash occurrences. Choose the crash occurrence you're interested in, and then switch between the tabs to view the detailed information on the selected crash occurrence.

On the Stack trace tab, examine the stack trace, check if there's a mapping file available, or download the stack trace to share it with your team.

Stack trace for a crash occurrence

On the Device information tab, view the detailed information on the device where the current crash occurrence happened. For instance, you can check the device geolocation, OS version, user language, and much more.

Device information for a crash occurrence

On the Session information tab, view the session recording or jump to the session details.

If the user session was recorded with Session Replay for Android or iOS, select Play to watch what happened on the user's screen immediately before your application crashed. The last event of the session is the crash, which is represented by a red dot in the timeline. Use the Session Replay controls to analyze the crash in detail.
Select View full session to jump to the user session details page, where you can get more information on the crashed session, examine the list of all user actions and events that occurred before the crash, or select a crash instance. For more details, see New: User session analysis.

Session information for a crash occurrence

Symbolication

Symbolication or deobfuscation converts hex codes and stack traces captured by Dynatrace into human-readable formats. By uploading symbol files, you can see clear-text method names in the stack trace instead of hex codes or cryptic names provided by the obfuscator.

For detailed instructions, see Upload and manage symbol files for mobile applications.