Cloud service for remote monitoring of IoT devices

“According to research, embedded software applications typically contain three to five missed bugs per 1,000 lines of code at the initial release,” said Johan Kraft, CEO and Founder of Percepio. “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.”

Percepio DevAlert, which during its beta-testing period was known as Device Firmware Monitor, 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. DevAlert comprises three Percepio components:

• Classification Engine – 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 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.
• Percepio Tracealyzer – An 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.

“Trace visualisation has long been an overlooked tool for fast, efficient debugging and Percepio has been the leader in that space for at least five years,” said Jacob Beningo, President and Principal Consultant at Beningo Embedded Group. “Now with DevAlert, Percepio is expanding the capabilities of this powerful tool into an expansive IoT space where the risk for deployed bugs is especially high. Developers can ensure the quality of their products from the field—often before customers become aware of any issues. This makes DevAlert a must-have for any embedded or IoT project.”

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.

“Utilising DevAlert, Percepio’s remote debugging tool, device manufacturers can now quickly identify and fix software in field-deployed IoT products,” said Gary Sugita, Director of Marketing, IoT Compute and Wireless Business at Cypress. “Cypress’ IoT platforms, including ultra-low power PSoC 6 microcontrollers and industry-leading WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, work seamlessly with Percepio’s powerful DevAlert and Tracealyzer tools.”

“As good as the STM32 family of 32-bit Arm Cortex-M MCUs is, and as powerful as the STM32 development ecosystem is, the underlying application code invariably contains bugs that can be difficult to find and fix,” added Laurent Hanus, Ecosystem Marketing Manager, STMicroelectronics. “Unobtrusively running a powerful trace diagnostic program such as Percepio DevAlert can help developers catch and squash bugs to minimise customer disruption.”