Observations from the CEO
After a long pause, I had the pleasure to once again walk the show floors of Embedded World in Nuremberg. It was nice to meet both old and new faces, and to get a thorough update on where the industry is heading.
Showcasing our products and solutions to various development teams, a few things stood out. No question ultra-connectivity for embedded devices is here – or at least the ambition thereof. Device management, application performance management, and not least edge observability was in high demand – but does any of these really work yet? The embedded edge device universe is a very heterogeneous one, and existing device observability solutions are normally just able to show you a huge fleet of black boxes. I heard it quite a few times on the floor: “You come in at work and have thousands of alarms from devices, all screaming Help me, I’m broken! – how useful is that other than causing general panic and distress?”
Imagine this was a 911 call from a crime scene. You would need a lot of information quickly, so you would send a forensic team to investigate. For the software team to find a quick resolution, they need deep edge observability, such as access to core dumps and software traces down to the lowest runtime execution levels. The problem is likely obscure, as it escaped the test phase, and maybe it is a hairy problem from multithreaded execution, with specific boundary triggering conditions that no one thought of. And most of all, the team wants the problem to be reproducible.
Bug or Break-in?
What’s even worse it that the problem they’re facing might be not an accident at all, but rather a malicious attempt to break into your system.
In this situation, how much would it be worth to you to have the option of “Please play back everything that happened on my device up to a millisecond before the problem?”
Understanding that there are no longer any hard borders between development, test, and deployment, we at Percepio are putting our hearts and minds into Continuous Observability. It simply does not feel right to cut the feedback wire to your product once it leaves the development desk – keep it plugged in!
Share your expertise
Finally, let me plug this opportunity. Percepio has always been “by engineers, for engineers”. Everything we build, we build based on the needs and headaches of our customers. We’re extremely grateful for all the suggestions and feedback we’ve received over the years. Now we want to enroll even more people to this group, who are open to share their expertise and experience. Please send an email to panel@percepio.com to enlist.
You can expect to receive questions from time to time, helping us define – and scrutinize – our products. Everything is of course voluntary – we understand that sometimes project schedules don’t allow for those extra minutes, so no worries. And we will not bombard you.
Andreas Lifvendahl, CEO