Modern mobile developers collect large volumes of diagnostics data from users’ app installations to ensure that performance is up to snuff. But they’ve historically had no easy way to gain the same insight into network usage, which is an equally important contributor to user experience.

Cloudflare Inc. is today addressing this blind spot with the launch of Mobile SDK, a free network monitoring tool. It takes the form of a library that developers can embed into their apps with a few steps.

Mobile SDK can flag potential issues at multiple levels. The library logs errors and network requests that are carried out too slowly and keeps track of what is the most frequent type of request at any given time, which helps identify cases of excessive bandwidth consumption.

Perhaps most notably, Cloudflare said, Mobile SDK keeps an eye on the activity of the other outside libraries inside an app. That could be, say, the software development kit that an application uses to connect to an ad network. According to the company, this data is automatically correlated with user sessions so developers can easily identify what parts of the in-app experience are affected by a networking problem.

Cloudflare said Mobile SDK is available for free and doesn’t require developers to use its content delivery network. The library is part of a broader strategy by the company to establish a bigger presence in an increasingly important market. Mobile devices generate more web traffic than desktop machines, which translates into a lot of in-app content that needs to delivered from backend servers to user devices.

This opportunity is also what drove Cloudflare to acquire a startup called Neumob Inc. in November that offered a CDN specifically optimized for apps. By providing Mobile SDK for free, Cloudflare could potentially get a foot in the door at more parts of the developer community and ultimately expand the adoption of its CDN.

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