Leverage Custom Queries to Gather Insights from Crash Analytics Data

A few months back, we introduced custom queries as a mechanism to run queries against the analytics data sent to us by the application. With crash analytics and custom queries, you now have the power to run queries on the data attached to the crash events. You are now able to query properties like username or any meta data attached to the crash event. 

Troubleshooting crashes reported by a user

If one of your users is reporting an app crash, then with the help of the custom queries interface, you can find out the most recent crash experienced by that user and gather more information about the reported crash. 

In the Dashboard, browse to the app (say tabCrashIssue as an example):

Click on Analytics -> Custom Queries 

Select Crash as the option under Grouping to group the results and use data.meta.username as the property name to filter the username. (NOTE: if you are using aca 1.2 then use data.username)

To filter on the username value, you should set the username value with the setUsername (username) method of the aca module. You can also set properties that would provide diagnostic information, like battery information, network conditions or custom application properties using setMetadata (key,value) and query for those values by filtering against data.meta.key. Additionally, the custom queries interface provides options to filter on platform versions, device model, application versions and other properties that are supported by the platform by default.   

Click on Preview to view the results of the query and Save. 

Crash events, feature events and breadcrumbs  

In AMPLIFY Crash Analytics, when you attach breadcrumbs, the breadcrumbs are sent to the platform as feature events. To avoid the display of the breadcrumbs, along with other feature events in analytics view, the details of the breadcrumbs are hidden by default in the breadcrumbs view of crash details. To view the breadcrumb details, you have to check the feature events checkbox and expand the breadcrumb list in the breadcrumb tabs.

Since crash events are treated as another type of AMPLIFY Analytic event, the crash events are counted against the organization’s analytics event capacity. Crash events have the same retention period entitlements as analytics events, i.e. 2 years for Enterprise plans and 3 months for Pro plans.