At Embedded World in Germany next week, Percepio will release DevAlert 1.0, the new name for the product we’ve talked about as Device Firmware Monitor during development and beta testing. DevAlert is a unique cloud service for IoT product organizations that provides developers with immediate awareness of firmware problems in deployed devices and visual diagnostic information to speed problem resolution.
It is well known from both research and experience that embedded software applications typically contain three to five missed bugs per 1,000 lines of code at the initial release. With DevAlert, developers become aware of these bugs as soon as they occur in the field and can fix them quickly. Updated firmware can then be sent out as over-the-air updates before the bug in question affects a large number of users.
Percepio DevAlert is a secure and scalable cloud service that works with AWS IoT Core and supports FreeRTOS- and ThreadX-based firmware; support for other RTOSes available on demand. It comprises three Percepio components:
- Classification Engine – a fully managed cloud service that categorizes alerts into unique issues and notifies the developers whenever new issues are found. This reduces the amount of analysis needed by the developers and shields them from being flooded with notifications, in case the same issue is detected in many devices. All alerts are stored in the database and can be retrieved for inspection, as well as for statistics reports that help developers assess the health of their fleet of deployed devices.
- Firmware Agent – a memory-efficient tracing recorder that provides a solid foundation based on 15 years of experience in RTOS event tracing. A memory buffer of just 4 Kbytes on the device can hold up to 1,000 software events; four to eight times more than comparable event trace recorders. This is critical for IoT device developers as it allows even memory-constrained systems to store traces of sufficient length, and maintains low operational costs for cloud upload and storage.
- Tracealyzer – the intuitive visual trace diagnostics tool that has been in development for more than a decade and has strong support from leading RTOS and silicon vendors. Tracealyzer enables developers to view reported traces, including events leading up to the error, in both high-level system overviews and a number of detailed views that allow developers to inspect the sequence of events from different angles and identify issues that cannot be seen using traditional debugging tools.
Semiconductor Partner Support for DevAlert
Percepio works closely with leading semiconductor vendors who have strong positions in the IoT development space to help their customers succeed. A number of partners have worked with Percepio to bring beta versions of DevAlert to their customers for testing, including Cypress and STMicroelectronics.
Available in March
DevAlert will be available to customers on 16 March 2020 through Percepio’s worldwide distributor network. Customers can select from three licensing tiers, depending on the volume of alerts and the number of Tracealyzer licenses they need. Evaluation licenses are available on request. Contact sales@percepio.com or visit the Percepio Partner listing to find a local distributor.
If you visit Embedded World, Percepio is in Hall 4, booth #305. You are welcome to drop by, talk about embedded development, and maybe win a T-shirt.