Cloud service monitors deployed IoT devices
For continuous improvement, DevAlert is a cloud service for IoT products that provides immediate awareness of firmware problems in deployed devices and visual diagnostic information, for speedy resolution and to increase customer satisfaction.
Specialising in visual trace diagnostics for embedded systems and the IoT, Percepio developed DevAlert in response to research which found that embedded software applications typically contain three to five missed bugs per 1,000 lines of code at the initial release. Johan Kraft, CEO and founder of Percepio, said: “Percepio DevAlert makes developers aware of these bugs as soon as they occur. The sooner an update can be provided, the fewer end-users will be affected. Reducing the time-to-repair for device software bugs, from the first symptoms until a correction is deployed, results in higher product quality and more satisfied customers over the lifetime of the product,” he added.
Percepio DevAlert (known as Device Firmware Monitor during beta testing) is a secure and scalable cloud service that works with AWS IoT Core and supports FreeRTOS- and ThreadX-based firmware. Support for other RTOS is available on demand.
DevAlert comprises three Percepio components, a classification engine, a firmware agent and the Percepio Tracealyzer.
The classification engine is a fully managed cloud service that categorises alerts into unique issues and notifies the developers whenever new issues are found. This reduces the amount of analysis needed by the developer and avoids a flood of notifications, if 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 to help assess the health of deployed devices.
Firmware Agent is a memory-efficient tracing recorder that has a memory buffer of just 4kbytes which can hold up to 1,000 software events; that is four to eight times more than comparable event trace recorders, notes Percepio. 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.
Percepio Tracealyzer is an intuitive visual trace diagnostics tool that has 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 also 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.
Percepio works closely with leading semiconductor vendors who have worked with the company to bring beta versions of DevAlert to their customers for testing. Cypress Semiconductor’s director of marketing, IoT Compute and Wireless, Gary Sugita, said: “Cypress’ IoT platforms, including . . . PSoC 6 microcontrollers and . . . Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, work seamlessly with Percepio’s powerful DevAlert and Tracealyzer tools.”
Laurent Hanus, ecosystem marketing manager, STMicroelectronics, commented on the STM32 family of 32-bit Arm Cortex-M microcontrollers: “Unobtrusively running a powerful trace diagnostic program such as Percepio DevAlert can help developers catch and squash bugs to minimise customer disruption.”
DevAlert will be available to customers on 16 March 2020 through Percepio’s worldwide distributor network.
