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June 2024

Product Analytics for Embedded Devices: Understand product usage, performance, and reliability like never before​

We've introduced a brand new feature set within Memfault that helps you uncover exactly how end-users interact with the devices you ship. Product Analytics helps embedded teams and product owners understand product usage, performance, and reliability like never before, giving them a clear view of feature and function usage, adoption, and success rates.

With this new Product Analytics feature set comes the introduction of Sessions. Sessions are a new report type defined by the occurrence of an activity, allowing you to track metrics in correlation with the usage of a specific feature or function on your Device. It is up to the Memfault user to decide what they want to define as a Session but when that Session is triggered, Memfault captures the length of that Session and any important metrics you'd like to track specific to that activity. This allows you to:

  • Track product engagement and adoption: Determine how newly launched features are being used and adopted by your customers to refine and optimize your product, driving higher satisfaction and retention.
  • Monitor and analyze feature usage patterns and behavior: Know when and how your customers are using specific features to understand where you should be focusing your efforts as you continue to develop your product.
  • Correlate feature usage with Device performance and reliability: Enhance Memfault's existing functionality with the ability to answer really complex questions about how your Devices are impacted by specific features.

Combining overall Device reliability data with product usage analytics will unify embedded development teams, enabling them to make well-informed decisions based on a comprehensive view of product health metrics.

General​

  • Added: New suite of features in charting and Device search to support Product Analytics, including:
    • Added: Support in charts for querying and displaying visualizations of Device Sessions with up to 16 segments displayed.
    • Added: Autoscroll to related visualization element (e.g., bar in a bar chart) when hovering over a value in the chart legend & vice versa.
    • Added: A new "duplicate segment" button in the chart configuration modal.
    • Added: Configurable chart-level segment colors in the chart configuration modal.
    • Added: Autocompletion for Metric values in Device search, Metric chart segmentation, and anywhere else users can specify a value for a Metric.
    • Added: New Monthly display option for Metrics and Device Vitals charts for users with the Advanced Analytics Bundle.
    • Added: Ability to drill down to Device search for Device count over time Metric charts, and pass Metric conditions through to the search.
    • Added: A new "report count" filter for Device search.
    • Added: New and updated documentation for Segments in Charts & Cards, and expanded explanations of Metric Reports and Device Inventory in the Memfault system.
    • Changed: Use signifying letters (A, B, C, D, etc.) to reference complex groups of filtered devices in charts.
    • Changed: Display more context for Metric data if unavailable in the selected chart timeframe, and display a message to the user with options for extending the retrieval period.
  • Added: Use a login captcha to defend against brute force login attacks after 5 failed login attempts.
  • Added: The Processing Log now has a live mode and a manual refresh button to enable more real-time analysis, and displays relative timestamps (e.g., "a few seconds ago")
  • Improved: Updated user password requirements to meet the latest NIST standards:
    • Require at least 12 characters.
    • Passwords of up to 64 characters must be allowed.
    • Reject well-known passwords
    • No compositional rules (don't enforce certain symbols or structure) but reject passwords that contain a contextual word, like mypasswordmemfault.
  • Improved: Activating a Release in a staged rollout for projects will now display notifications when staged rollouts are scheduled, updated or aborted; once when the action is requested and another when it completes.
  • Improved: Various UI glitches and improvements (fix bug that prevented the search for users from displaying in the admin panel and a bug that prevented successfully creating or editing Fleet alerts, addressed a URL decoding error when percentage signs % are included in a Metric name, non-admin users can create Jira issues again, allow opening archived metrics in the settings page, Device timezone setting is re-enabled)
  • Fixed: Coredumps captured with a custom reboot reason will now display the correct Reason in Trace viewer.
  • Fixed: Count Metric configs instead of metrics for quotas enforcement after the introduction of new sessions reports (multiple report types with the same Metric caused duplicate Metric counts).

MCU​

  • SDK version 1.9.3 was released. Some highlights:
    • Fixed: a bug when CONFIG_MEMFAULT_LWIP_METRICS=y that may cause invalid Metric values. LwIP stats by default are only 16-bits wide and this can cause underflow when calculating Heartbeat values. This fix forces LWIP_STATS_LARGE=1 to make LwIP use 32-bit counters.

Android​

  • Added: Support for QuickStart with the new QuickStart APK
  • SDK version 4.17.0 was released. Some highlights:
    • Support for Session metrics. This enables Memfault to be used for more product-specific use cases by associating metrics to product functionality.
    • Added: An override for Bort Lite's serial by sending an INTENT_ACTION_OVERRIDE_SERIAL intent with an INTENT_EXTRA_SERIAL string extra.
    • Fixed: A bug where Device information would be incorrectly cached until Bort restarted.

Linux​

  • We did not publish a new version of the Linux SDK in June 2024.

CLI​

  • We published versions 1.0.10 and 1.0.11 of the memfault-cli in June 2024. Some highlights:
    • Changed: Source pyelftools from https://pypi.org/project/pyelftools/ again, as the required bug fixes have been merged upstream.
    • Added: An option -no-check-uploaded for upload-mcu-symbols to skip an initial check if the Symbol file already exists. This option should be used with Org Tokens limited to only uploading Symbol file