June 2023

Metric Charts: Comparison by Software Version or Cohort

Metric charts have been enhanced with the addition of a new chart type presenting a direct comparison version to version or cohort to cohort without time as a variable. This new chart type presents a comparison of min/mean/max data aggregated across the entire comparison populations based on your selection (e.g. min/mean/max ever reported on v1.0.0 vs min/mean/max ever reported on v.1.0.1).

The pre-existing “over-time” chart view restricts comparison to an 8 week window which is great for intensive monitoring but less good at judging absolute performance. This new chart type allows users to make more effective performance comparisons in real-world scenarios and take decisions with more confidence.

You can read more about this new chart type in Memfault's documentation.

Increased Configurability for Alerting and Notifications

Alerting and notification functionality has received a set of significant enhancements. These include the introduction of configurable incident start and end delays, the ability to decide at which stages of an incident a user wants a notification, and increased control over the scheduling for incident summary notifications.

These changes are designed to give users greater control on an alert-by-alert basis over the alerting behavior and incident related notifications, reducing unnecessary “noise” without sacrificing visibility. Ultimately these changes help ensure alerts trigger notifications which are highly relevant and timely.

You can read more about these changes to alerting, incidents and notifications in Memfault's documentation.

General

• Added: Support for Incident start and end delays when creating Device-threshold Alerts
• Added: New notifications options for Device Alerts: Get notified when incident starts/resolves or a receive a digest on an configurable frequency
• Added: Documentation on Alert improvements
• Added: Documentation on Metric Charts by Cohort or Software Version
• Improved: Various UI glitches and improvements (Issue details not being visible when opened in small windows, increasing the automatic window refresh from 5m to 12h, tooltips for dates/times rendering with less than full opacity after initially blinking fully opaque, include chart name in the deletion modal, show SSO creation date under Admin → Single Sign-on (SSO) page, add number of samples contributing to a metric chart, metric chart filters under Dashboard → Metrics are now sticky)
• Fixed: Metric Charts by Cohort or Software Version not populated for certain accounts
• Fixed: Limits are not displayed correctly under Settings → Quotas page
• Fixed: Metric/Issue Charts fetching the latest values when clicked on the refresh button only when the last refresh was more than 15 minutes ago
• Fixed: Certain Device Set calculations timing out

MCU

• SDK versions 🎉 1.0.0, 1.0.1, 1.1.0, 1.1.1 released (please note, the move to 1.0.0 is for consistency and does not signal a breaking change). Some highlights:
  • Added: New built-in metrics (FreeRTOS Idle Task runtime percentage metric, MbedTLS metrics for maximum and current memory used, Wi-Fi performance metrics to the (ESP-IDF port), FileSystem_BytesFree for tracking VFS bytes free)
  • Added: Memfault Metrics tracking LwIP runtime statistics (packet counts) for ESP-IDF port.
  • Improved: The quality of Zephyr stack usage detection (originally released in SDK 0.43.0) when capturing less than the full stack contents for each thread.
  • Improved: (Zephyr port) Include latest log statements in the coredump log data during fault when deferred logging is enabled.
  • Fixed: A bug in the mbedtls port causing an infinite loop under certain error conditions on TLS handshake
  • Fixed: ESP_ERROR_CHECK() assert coredumps will now correctly show as assert in the Memfault coredump analysis view, instead of "Hard Fault"
  • Fixed: Reduce the amount of error logs emitted by the MbedTLS port HTTP client while polling for session established.
  • Changed: Renamed built-in metrics to use a consistent scheme (lower_case_w_underscores). This convention will be used going forward.

Android

• We did not publish a new version of the Android Bort AOSP SDK in June.

Linux

• Fixed: The backend processing of coredumps now also works for coredumps from programs that had dynamic libraries loaded from symlinked paths or relative paths.
• We did not publish a new version of the Memfault Linux SDK in June.

CLI

CLI versions 0.18.0, 0.18.1, 🎉 1.0.0, 1.0.1 were released (please note, the move to 1.0.0 is for consistency and does not signal a breaking change). Some highlights:

• Added: New extra-metadata option to upload-ota-payload to attach custom metadata to that OTA release. The metadata will be returned from Memfault Cloud when fetching the latest Android OTA release.
• Added: --deactivate option to deploy-release, which disables a release for a cohort
• Improved: Continue uploading the entire folder of symbols even if any single upload fails due to the symbol file being too large.
• Fixed: upload-mcu-symbols to skip uploading if the symbol file has already been uploaded, and return a zero exit code in this case
• Fixed: upload-custom-data-recording to print a more helpful error message when exceeding device rate limits.