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Introducing Sync Dashboard: Monitor synchronization details of your users & devices

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How to integrate mobility into a well-run company without interfering with its existing operations?
We believe that providing tools that cover the whole lifecycle of a mobile solution simplifies the implementation, user adoption & engagement with business apps. The right set of mobile app development tools  enables anyone to build apps, and beyond.
With Resco platform’s tools, you are able to:

  • Create & brand state-of-the-art business apps from scratch or connected to an existing system, without expert coding skills, thanks to a re-vamped Woodford HTML
  • Collaborate on a single project within an entire team
  • Release the app on chosen marketplaces
  • Monitor how the app & users perform with Sync Dashboard

Monitor how the app performs and behaves

Resco’s Winter Release ‘18 brought along many updates to our Mobile Business Apps Platform. One of the most significant ones: Sync Dashboard, helps you monitor how your app and its users behave in terms of synchronization.
Whether you utilize solutions built solely on Resco’s platform or integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM/365 or Salesforce – your data are in a constant state of flux. Often, large sets of data travel from one environment to another.
Data synchronization is one of the most important things within Resco’s mobile app. The prime benefit of sync is the abstraction over the network layer. Resco users synchronize their data on a regular basis, especially in the offline mode to avoid any data loss. Any change made in the offline mode on a single device needs to be synced (uploaded) to the backend system – and vice versa (downloaded to the app). Check out a quick overview on data sync on our blog.
When such big sets of data “travel from point A to point B”, some of them can “get lost” on the way. You might be familiar with common sync issues like incorrect data or synchronization errors.

Meet Sync Dashboard, a solution for all active users


Until the Autumn Update ’18, when an issue appeared after a synchronization, you would have to send a log manually via the About section in the app. Only after that you could have started analyzing what was happening to your users and devices. Since the release, logs can be automatically sent to the server.
Winter Release ’18 brought yet another enhancement: a brand-new tool called Sync Dashboard.

“We wanted to give you the tools to be more proactive and find out what’s really happening with your users even before they contact you and report a problem. That is why we introduced Synchronization Dashboards represented by charts and lists that give you information about how your users behave in terms of synchronization.” – Juraj Mojik, Product Manager at Resco

Sync Dashboard gives admins a 360° overview of sync details – that can be further filtered according to chosen preferences. Here is what you can find out:

  • How many of your users have sync errors?
  • How long does each synchronization take?
  • How many of your users perform incremental syncs, how many full synchronizations?
  • How many records are being synchronized at once?
  • What’s the average length of synchronization?
  • What are the sync errors?
  • …and more

Note that this is a separate tool and needs to be enabled in Woodford first. All you have to do is to open the auditing section that is a part of every mobile project in Woodford – make sure that Auditing and Log synchronization event are enabled.

Once this adjustment is all set, published and your project is applied, your users will start sending you sync data automatically.
Additionally, as of the Spring Release ’19, this comprehensive monitoring of synchronization gets brand new upgrade, called Sync conflict resolution.
Sync conflict resolution – synchronization conflicts are visible and can be resolved directly from the Sync Dashboard; this reduces the need of users to manually resolve their conflicts, because these can be resolved remotely by administrators; there are several places in Woodford that control this feature (Mobile Audit of synchronization must be enabled and Conflict Strategy on selected entities must be set to Manual Action):

  • Log Conflict Details – enable this option to see which values produced the conflict; default is disabled
  • Remote Conflict Resolution – enable this option so that remote user’s (admin) resolution is executed on the device; default is enabled
conflict_resolution

Let’s have a closer look at Sync Dashboard in practice

Launching the Dashboard

Microsoft Dynamics CRM/365 & Resco Cloud users: Within your organization’s configuration console
Salesforce users: Sign in here with you Salesforce credentials and click ‘Open Sync Dashboard’
Resco Cloud
Microsoft Dynamics 365/CRM
Salesforce

After the launch, you will get a clear-cut overview of sync details.

Sync Dashboard consists of three main parts:

  1. Filter
  2. Sync details for users & devices and Sync times for a given period – based on selected filters
  3. A list of all users’ logs with details

What you can view:

  1. Session
  2. Day
  3. Device

What you can filter:

  1. Start and end date
  2. Users
  3. Sync Type
  4. OS Type
  5. Sync Result (OK, warning, error, conflicts)
syncdashboard_filter

How to use the Dashboard

You can use Sync Dashboard simply to track sync details or if you’ve lately noticed any sync changes. For example, if you realized, there have been more errors within the last month than usual. You can analyze which users and devices are affected, or compare the results with the previous month, etc.

Example:

Let’s say you simply want to compare how do different platforms & devices behave during a full synchronization.
You can compare the amount of errors, average sync times between your Windows, iOS and Android users and much more.
So, how were your users & devices behaving last month?

  1. Select the time period: last month
  2. Choose a sync type: full sync
  3. Select OS Type: compare them all
  4. Choose an Item Type: for now, we’d like to see all of them



You can display all of this within the Session View.

Note that charts are interactive. Click on a selected result (Windows) and the filter will be automatically updated, too.
As of the Spring Release ’19, charts displaying platform breakdown, sync results, hourly synchronization overview are now also available.
In the bottom of the page you will see a list that entails each synced project’s Name and Date, User, Device and other details that you can explore further.

Use the Day View, if you’d like to see the same results – but divided into separated charts and lists for each day of your selected time period.

And finally, the Device View shows the results broken down across individual devices.
On top of all, your synchronization sessions can e exported from Sync Dashboard in CSV format and can be further processed in various BI tools.

We encourage you to give Sync Dashboards a try and stay tuned for the upcoming updates.
Should you have any further questions, we are happy to help at mobilecrm@resco.net.
 

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