Observations from the CEO
You hear us at Percepio talking about Observability a lot. For customers using our award-winning Tracealyzer tool, this might sound a bit strange – isn’t Tracealyzer about diagnostics, debugging and profiling?
Mostly, yes, but let me share why we are putting so much emphasis on our Continuous Observability solutions. Observability as a category originated in the Cloud and IT domains, where the dynamics and growing complexity required another viewing angle to ensure safety, reliability and integrity of the whole system.
In the end, observability is basically about creating the capability to measure the internal states of a system by examining its outputs, using logs, traces, and so on. In the embedded systems universe, this way of doing debugging is quite familiar, albeit neither the term Observability, nor its full value, is yet widely understood. For example, catching software traces and examining them in various views, is often the only way to circle in bugs and anomalies in complex, multithreaded software. But thinking of Observability in a more holistic way, and the new best practice of Observability Driven Development (ODD), extends the scope, and thus the value for product-building organizations. Whereas debugging is reactive – you respond to an issue found, preferably during development or test, or from a field error report, and then the work begins to reproduce, fix, and test the new build again – Continuous Observability is a proactive approach that requires you to start development with observability in mind.
Adhering to Continuous Observability makes sure that the product or device can check and monitor itself, and report back during all phases of the life cycle; from design, to coding, to testing and field trials, and even full market deployment. It could be described as having a zero-trust policy on software execution in a complex and dynamic environment, ensuring that there is always a digital feedback loop through which you can monitor the health and performance of the system.
With the upcoming launch of Percepio Detect, in many ways the perfect Tracealyzer companion, our customers are now able to get a comprehensive solution for Continuous Observability. We are confident this will provide a step function improvement in software quality. I encourage you to apply to join our Detect Early Access Program, and read up on the subject in the magazine articles linked to below, giving more color to the Continuous Observability paradigm.
Andreas Lifvendahl, CEO
- New Electronics: Continuous Observability
- Embedded Computing: How Continuous Observability Unlocks Remote Debugging Superpowers