Flows

Flows provides visibility on the health and performance of the most important user flows in your application.

Flows gives you a consolidated view of the health and performance of your app's most important flows. With simple instrumentation, you can measure the time it takes users to complete key user journeys, understand completion and drop-off rates as well as their root causes, learn what crashes are affecting your flows, and gain insight into the various spans and operations occurring within those flows and their performance.

Instrumentation

To create a flow you just need to define a start and an end for that flow in your code. Luciq automatically captures health and performance data between those two points. All instances of flows with the same name are aggregated on your dashboard.

Rules around creating Flows:

• Flows are uniquely identified by their name.

• You can run several flows with different names in parallel.

• You can’t run different instances of the same flow in parallel.

• You can start a flow while your app is in the background.

• You can’t end a flow while your app is in the background.

• You can create up to 10,000 unique Flows.

Start a Flow

To mark the beginning of a Flow, add the following API call to your code:

JavaScript

// Start a Flow
APM.startFlow("flowName");

This API call initiates an instance of a flow named “flowName”. If any other instances of the same flow are already started and weren’t ended yet, they are considered drop-offs.

Naming Limitation for Flows:

• Flow name can be up to 150 characters. Any extra characters are truncated.

• Flow name can't be null or an empty string.

• Avoid adding any of these special characters [, (, ), =, {, }, <, >, /, , ] (commas not included) as they will be replaced with _.

End a Flow

To mark the end of an already started Flow, use the following API call:

JavaScript

// End an existing flow
APM.endFlow("flowName");

This API call ends an instance of the flow “flowName”. Be sure to call this at the right point in your code to accurately capture the duration and completion state of the flow.

Adding Custom Flow Attributes

Luciq automatically attaches some attributes like app version, OS version, and device to all Flows. You can use those attributes to drill-down and find insightful patterns in your data (e.g., if a performance problem is related to a specific device model).

For advanced analysis, you can create your own custom attributes and attach them to any flow. This step is optional but can provide valuable context for debugging specific user segments or behaviors.

Add Custom Flow Attributes (JavaScript)

// Add custom attributes to an existing flow
APM.setFlowAttribute("flowName", "key", "value");

This API call creates a new custom attribute called “key” with the value “value” and attaches it to the flow “flowName”.

When using custom attributes that can have a large number of unique values, please group those values into buckets. Using a massive number of unique values can negatively impact your dashboard’s performance.

Rules and Limitations for Custom Flow Attributes:

• The attribute's key can be up to 30 characters.

• The attribute's value can be up to 60 characters.

• Avoid adding any of these special characters [, (, ), =, {, }, <, >, /, , ] (commas not included) as they will be replaced with _.

• You can add up to 5 unique custom attributes to each flow instance.

• You can have up to 20 unique custom attribute keys across all instances of a flow.

• The attribute's key can't be an empty string or null.

• The attribute's value can't be an empty string.

• You can call the API twice with the same key to override a previous value.