Facebook introduces Parse Explorer, a debugging tool for apps on Parse

Facebook’s Parse cloud back-end for developing and deploying mobile apps is getting a debugging tool called Parse Explorer.

The service lets developers dive in to the details of apps running on the Parse platform by making queries of logs with a new query language. Developers can sort, filter count, and limit a range of logs with Parse Explorer. They can also save queries and make charts. Parse Explorer can also show developers the latency for their application programming interface (API) requests.

Parse is gradually turning on the new service for customers, Facebook Parse software engineer Christine Yen wrote in a blog post on the news today.

The news comes in conjunction with a slew of developer-oriented announcements that Facebook in general and Parse in particular are making at the F8 conference in San Francisco this week.

When it comes to running mobile applications, Facebook is becoming a better and better choice over time. Last year growing cloud provider Google announced the Cloud Debugger, but other than that, there haven’t been many efforts among cloud providers to deliver internal debugging services.

Time will tell if Facebook decides to expand into a broader cloud provider that could take on the likes of Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. But that shift could still be some time away, as Parse still runs on top of Amazon Web Services, the giant of the cloud infrastructure market.