To help developers gauge delivery of notifications in production, the Push Notification Console now includes metrics to get insights into the behavior of an app and its integration with the Apple Push Notification service (APNs).
Push notifications are a key mechanism to keep users engaged with an app, so it is of critical importance for developers to ensure they are delivered timely and reliably as well as tune their solution to increase adoption by focusing on the events that are most relevant.
To help developers troubleshoot delivery failures, Apple was already providing the ability to inspect delivery logs in the Push Notification Console. Using a known notification identifier returned by APNs (apns-unique-id), the Push Notification Console will show the full history of the notification, as it transitioned through a sequence of states, including any state that could explain a delivery failure.
The new metrics tab in the Push Notification Console goes one step further by displaying aggregated, rounded reports on notification states as they pass through APNs.
You can monitor the status of your push notifications, after APNs accepts your request, using Metrics. Metrics shows you if APNs delivers or discards your push notifications, or saves them in persistent storage to attempt delivery later.
According to Apple, successful delivery of notifications depends on a number of factors, including correct notification attributes, such as push priority and push type; the status of the destination device, e.g., its power state; external factors that could affect delivery, such as the device's connection quality; and user preferences, including disabling push notifications or background refresh, or low-power mode, etc.
The new Metrics tab lists notifications by aggregating them into categories, such as "Stored - Device Offline" or "Discarded - Disabled", which explain why the notification were not delivered. This is also a helpful resource to understand which devices are inactive and should be removed from APNs to save on resources.
Introduced at WWDC23, the Push Notification Console provides an intuitive web interface to send notifications and validate end-to-end push functionality. Additionally, as already mentioned, it gives access to delivery logs and includes a few tools to you authenticate and validate your implementation with APNs.