November 2023

Build your own dashboards in Memfault

Users can now create custom dashboards and manage the layout of content within these new dashboards. This change makes dashboards much more flexible, able to cope with a wider variety of use cases such as dashboards for specific teams, software versions, cohorts, etc. Users can also re-arrange the content within the dashboard using drag, drop and resize functionality.

Create and manage dashboards in the All Dashboards tab within the “Dashboards” sub-menu and customize chart layouts using the “Layout mode” toggle available within each dashboard. Find out more about creating custom dashboards and using layout mode in Memfault’s documentation.

Improved issue management with tags

Users can now add tags to issues within Memfault and use the tags to filter issue searches and build issue charts. This change facilitates more sophisticated issue triaging, grouping and categorization within Memfault. For example, tags could be used to indicate issue priority and also to associate groups of related but separate issues together.

A user can add tags in the issue view, each issue can carry multiple tags and tags can be added or removed at any time.

Better visibility of processing errors

Users can now view a detailed listing of processing errors in the Processing Log under the “Integration Hub” sub-menu. The Processing Log contains details on errors such as missing symbol files on coredump upload, MAR file processing errors and instances of device data not being accepted by the server. This change adds a huge amount of additional visibility into errors related to processing of device data in Memfault.

These processing errors are now also reported on the device timeline adding another layer of debugging information for devices. Users can read more about the Processing Log in Memfault’s documentation.

General

• Added: The ability to create, configure and customize dashboards based on different use cases and user interests, as well as new markdown cards for displaying content within dashboards. More info available in the Memfault Docs.
• Added: New Processing Logs page for better debugging during integration and understanding issues with production processing errors. More info on this new feature in the Memfault Docs.
• Added: Issues can now have user-defined tags and can be used as a filter on the issues search page.
• Added: Capability to create, update and delete multiple project keys within a single project.
• Added: Processing errors now show up on the device timeline with associated information to help with debugging.
• Added: New debuginfod endpoint to support searching for symbol files and source code by build ids. Read more about how to use this in the Memfault Docs.
• Improved: Various UI glitches and improvements (allow more concurrent chart data loading over HTTP2 for faster dashboard load times, filter projects in project selector by name and slug, hide logging resolution on MCU projects where it does not apply, tooltip rendering was missing some content and styles, button, dropdown and font style fixes)
• Fixed: Force removing OTA deployments when a cohort is deleted, instead of allowing them to continue to exist.
• Changed: New Integration Hub sidebar navigation item, which includes a sub-menu for Events Debug, Chunks Debug and Processing Logs pages.
• Changed: URL parameter modifications for dashboard live-filters. Existing links to dashboards that contain live-filters may break after this change, but the user will be notified of the issue.

MCU

• SDK versions 1.4.2, 1.4.3, 1.4.4, and 1.5.0 were released. Some highlights:
  • Added: New built-in crash-free hours, battery drop, and connectivity metrics.
  • Added: New ESP-IDF built-in metric, wifi_ap_oui, which will record the associated AP's Organizationally Unique Identifier (OUI) in the Memfault heartbeat.
  • Added: Support for Session Metrics. These are similar to Heartbeat Metrics, except they are set on an arbitrary session interval. Session metrics are useful for tracking device operation sessions- for example, measuring properties for a BLE connected stove top during a single cooking session. See the metrics.h header file for usage details.
  • Fixed: Removed a warning in Zephyr 3.5+ where the zephyr/random/rand32.h header was renamed to zephyr/random/random.h. Thanks to @nordicjm for reporting this!
  • Changed: The metrics convenience API added in 1.4.3 was renamed to MEMFAULT_METRIC_SET_*, to better support the new Session Metric feature.

Android

• SDK version 4.10.0 was released. Some highlights:
  • Added: New network stats metrics. This tracks the total and per-app usages of the Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and cellular interfaces. Please see documentation for more information.
  • Added: New Crash-Free hours metric. Please see documentation for more information.
  • Added: New battery health metrics. Please see documentation for more information.
  • Fixed: A typo in TemperatureMetricCollector. Thank you @satur9nine for bringing this to our attention and fixing.
  • Changed: Previous AOSP system images with Bort are not backwards compatible with newer versions of the Bort apk, due to new permissions required by Bort that are only granted by a new AOSP build. These permissions were previously granted to UsageReporter. This means that newer versions of the Bort apk cannot run on older system images - they must be released together.

Linux

• Added: Processing and displaying Linux traces even when the symbol file is missing. Support for MCU will follow.
• SDK version 1.8.1 was released. This was a small release to address a bug we discovered in how MAR entries' estimated size was being calculated. We recommend all customers using the logging feature update to this version.
  • Fixed: Logic for estimating the number of inodes that a MAR entry will take on disk. This bug could cause MAR entries to be deleted before upload when using the logging feature with significant logging activity.

CLI

• We did not publish a new version of the memfault-cli in November 2023.