Tracking Battery Life Best Practices​

Two of the most important IoT reliability metrics are the expected and the actual battery life for devices. Understanding and predicting trends for battery life and detecting regressions with thousands to millions of devices in the field is a challenging problem that Memfault recently published advice and product improvements for.

The combination of metric charts, device timeline, and the recently added documentation with code samples help with understanding battery life of MCU, Linux or Android devices.

Linux SDK 1.0 with Coredump support​

Memfault's Linux SDK reached version 1.0 when introducing support for Coredumps: In the event of a crash of any process on the system, memfaultd produces a memory dump that will be uploaded to Memfault for further processing to allow for detailed debugging across the fleet. Together with the already existing support for OTA, metrics, and reboot reasons, Memfault now offers all its essential features on Linux devices!

The documentation of Memfault’s Linux SDK was extended even further to explain the integration steps as well as the growing number of configuration options.

Linux SDK 0.3.0 – Metrics and Diagnostics Data​

Memfault's Linux support reaches another milestone: Devices can now report metrics and diagnostic data to measure the success of software updates (OTA) and to proactively diagnose anomalies before users even experience their effect. The Memfault Linux SDK 0.3.0 ships with a configurable set of plugins for collectd to obtain standard KPIs at the operating system level (e.g. available storage or RAM, CPU utilization, or network status and traffic). You can also use the SDK to collect product-specific custom metrics via statsd.

When sent to the cloud, all telemetry data is being processed and distilled to fleet-wide time-series metrics (e.g. "was there an uptick in avg. CPU usage since the last version?"), device attributes (e.g. “which devices at site B ran for more than 6 months already without reboot?"), and detailed per-device insights via the Timeline UI (e.g. “are there any anomalies on the network traffic that correlate with crashes reported for this device?").

Combined with Memfault's alerting feature, operating your fleet of Linux devices is now easier than ever!

Improved Device Timeline​

Memfault’s Device Timeline provides a view for each device’s metrics, reboots and crashes to make debugging easier. With the recent performance improvements, Device Timeline now renders considerably more time-series metrics simultaneously and expandable “Panels” group relevant metrics together for ease of use (see Value History, Foreground, Longwakes below).

Linux SDK 0.2.0​

Memfault extends its features on embedded Linux toward basic fleet operations. You can now measure basic fleet-wide health metrics by tracking reboots and their cause at scale. Similar to Memfault’s MCU and Android SDKs, there is now a dedicated Memfault Linux SDK 0.2.0 with source code including examples. The SDK repository comes with Docker images including QEMU support to simplify the first steps.

As part of the SDK, a new on-device agent memfaultd orchestrates the configuration of related components such as SWUpdate for OTA. It will act as a minimal yet central component in future releases for features such as metrics and crash reporting.

There is also a new Getting Started section that guides users through the setup with Yocto, and the reference documentation covers more details.

Normalized Charts​

Memfault’s charts can now be normalized to convert absolute values such as “number of incidents”, sums, and counts to corresponding relative values “per 1,000 devices". This helps in understanding real trends when you are looking at values over time or when comparing values between populations of different sizes.

This feature also works with custom metric charts for any custom metric. It is particularly helpful to measure the success of an ongoing OTA update by comparing devices from large production cohort “Default” against those from a smaller test cohort “Beta”. Chart normalization is also generally useful when the population size changes over time (e.g. new devices being activated continuously).

Notification Targets​

Memfault improved its notification system and how notifications will be sent on Alerts. For each individual Alert, you can now decide which team members, external systems, or groups thereof should receive an email. All members of @team-maintenance may want to receive notifications about devices with an abnormal battery discharge rate while a spike in connectivity issues on the “Beta” cohort may only be relevant in the #beta-release Slack channel.

At Settings → Notifications, there are extensive options to customize the @userhandle for any team member to connect Memfault to dedicated Slack channels or any other external system (e.g. PagerDuty, Opsgenie) by registering external email addresses. Any combination of these User Handles and External Targets can be added to a Notification Group and used to control how to notify per Alert.

Memfault OTA for Embedded Linux​

Memfault’s over-the-air update service is now available on Embedded Linux with SWUpdate via the hawkBit DDI. This makes all Memfault OTA management and hosting features such as cohorts, staged rollouts, full vs. delta releases, and a scalable global CDN available to Linux devices that utilize one of the most popular update agents. Memfault also added support for forced (non-interactive) updates – invaluable for delivering security updates to embedded IoT devices.

To communicate with SWUpdate clients, Memfault acts as a hawkBit update server. It implements the Direct Device Integration API enabling other on-device agents such as RAUC (via hawkBit client) to deliver and install software remotely as well.

More Documentation​

Memfault’s documentation at docs.memfault.com received a new landing page and various other additions.

The updated landing page outlines content across MCU, Android, and Linux. It also links to additional learning resources such as video content and source code examples. Other improvements include the new page Introduction to Memfault, more information on Memfault’s Linux Support, and many smaller new sections such as a comparison between Android Bug Reports and Caliper.

Improvements on Charts​

Memfault surfaces relevant insights about your fleet via charts. They receive updates regularly to be more comprehensive and useful.

The dashboard chart “Active Devices” was redesigned to be a bar chart to communicate its underlying data more clearly: “Devices that communicated with Memfault in a given time period”. Tooltips on several charts better highlight the numerical values their lines and bars represent. The chart “Reboot Reasons” also allows for drill-down on any day by clicking on the respective labels.

Improved Device Search​

Memfault organizes your data around the concept of devices. An investigative search for matching devices is a key activity when analyzing data around device attributes and time-series metrics. Memfault’s device search also acts as a hub when clicking on details on charts, OTA management, or as part of crash analysis. It allows you to precisely describe a population of devices before performing follow-up tasks such as assigning them to a specific Cohort or describing a new Device Set.

We made significant improvements to the device search! Most fields now accept multiple values (”OR”) and can be repeated where applicable (”AND”). You can search for device attributes and time-series data at the same time and it is even possible to search for historical data across different time ranges at once.

When combined, you can now conveniently describe (and store as Device Set) populations such as

• “Devices on v1.2 that were charged >90% earlier this week but rebooted due to low power yesterday” – to validate presumed bug fixes via operational data, or
• “Devices with attributes was_reworked: true, shipment_state: "back to us" and assignee: "John"” – to use custom device attributes for inventory management

Android SDK Bort 4.0​

Memfault’s AOSP SDK “Bort” received a major update 4.0 with many improvements such as additional support for Android 12 and multi-user compatibility.

We added support for Custom Metrics so that devices can report product-specific numerical values, strings, and state transitions on regular intervals. Together with a growing set of built-in Metrics, this leads to a powerful combination of per-device debugging (e.g. correlation of CPU activity and battery voltage) and fleet-wide insights (e.g. “how many devices exceed 80% of their storage” or “What is the average battery discharge rate?”). The reported values contribute to the recently introduced Time-Series Metrics and Device Attributes.

Another rather advanced feature enables devices without direct Internet connection to report crashes and metrics to Memfault. Data is packaged as .mar (Memfault Archive) files and vendors may upload them at a later time or upon request (e.g. downloaded periodically via USB or in a local network by an auxiliary device). This allows vendors to use Memfault in scenarios with strict security requirements.

Dashboard changes to charts​

Memfault’s Dashboard provides an overview of your fleet at a glance. We have updated the charts “Active Devices” (more sources used as signal) and “Software Versions” (only active devices considered) to better compare apples to apples.

The visible time range for “Software Versions” can now be changed from “2 months” all the way down to just “24 hours”. Since the same chart is now being used on the Cohort details page, it not only allows you to see long-term trends, but also acts as timely signal to observe the effect of an ongoing OTA software rollout.

The charts “Seen Devices” and “Received Events” have been removed.

Improved OTA with Version Matrix and Delta Releases​

Memfault steps up OTA observability and release management. Use the new Version Matrix (Fleet → Cohorts → Cohort Details) to learn about the version distribution of your devices (rows) and which version your devices will be updated to via OTA (columns).

Changes to your software rollout (including percentages for staged rollouts) are reflected in the matrix immediately. This is especially helpful when using the newly introduced Delta Releases that describe a path between specific versions. Every software version, OTA release, and number in the matrix is clickable to get to more details if needed.

Even complex and unusual scenarios are visible at a glance: devices with no compatible OTA payload, devices with a higher version than the cohort’s target release, must-pass-through releases and their effect, as well as many other edge cases are represented with data that is always live.

The Version Matrix gives you confidence both while preparing your software rollout and during the ongoing rollout, and it still helps you understand the version distribution of your fleet when no further updates are planned.