The folks at Percepio have been “bug”ging me to look at their DevAlert tool. I wrote “bug”ging, as that’s what DevAlert is all about. Managing bugs.
Suppose you have thousands of devices deployed around the world and a defect occurs. You have a few options:
- Ignore the bug report as you’re only weeks from retiring.
- Have an army of support people dealing with the angry emails and phone calls. They will create possibly a blizzard of bug reports which engineering can slog through.
- Log bugs to the cloud.
Options 2 and 3 have a major problem: A bug report will generally not contain much debugging information. And, if there are thousands of deployed devices, your in-box and support people can be overwhelmed by the mountain of reports about the same bug. For any non-trivial problem you’ll likely get a slew of conflicting information from the customer (“when I press the red button when the moon is full, and the fans are on in the next room, then…”). Without engineering information about the problem, all you and your support team get are reports about symptoms. Wouldn’t it be nice to have fingerprints as well? Maybe a snapshot of the system’s internal states?