We've introduced a "What's New" announcements tool within the Memfault web
application to help users stay informed about the latest features without
waiting for the monthly changelog. This tool notifies users about new features,
guides, system updates, and user surveys as soon as they become available.
We continuously improve our services based on your feedback, and this real-time
feed will help us showcase the frequent updates we make to our services so users
can take advantage of them right away.
Users can now view the distribution of issues by device attributes in the Issue
view. Within the Issue view users can now select an attribute from the drop down
and see the distribution of that specific Issue by the attribute selected in the
same way as you can see distribution of Issue by software version or hardware
type. This is an extremely powerful tool to identify correlations between issues
occurring across your Fleet and things like production batch or device tree
information such as chip type.
Currently correlations are best used for attributes that are fixed for the life
of the device because the correlation is based on the most recently reported
state of the attribute on the device and not the attribute at the time the Issue
occurred. This means it's good for correlating with things like production
batch, and not good for correlating with things like state of charge. For more
information on Issue attribute correlation please read our
technical documentation.
We have made a number of enhancements to our Device Vitals feature set designed
to make it easier to go from top level insight to device level investigation.
Firstly, we have introduced a set of templated dashboards for each Device Vital
that can be selected when creating a new dashboard and will pre-populate with
our recommended chart and card types.
We have also introduced two ways to get to a list of devices based on their
performance on a specific Device Vital either by drilling down from a Device
Vitals percentiles chart, or using Device Vital readings as a filter in device
search.
We believe that some combination of Device Vitals should be central to the way
teams measure the performance of devices and making it easier to get the
insights and act on them unlocks more value, more easily. You can read more
about all of our Device Vitals functionality in Memfault's
technical documentation.
We made several enhancements and improvements to the navigation experience
within device timeline based on user feedback. The improvements include adding a
time interval selection (e.g. 1 day or week), zoom and pan buttons.
Device timeline is central to the value Memfault provides, giving you the
complete context of what's happening on your devices. These improvements make it
easier to isolate specific points of interest within the device timeline and
move through the timeline more easily.
Device Vitals: Built-in metrics and out-of-the-box visualizations for stability, battery life and connectivity
With our newly released Device Vitals
feature set we have added a streamlined and standardized way to start monitoring
critical health and performance data from your devices. The three Device Vitals,
Stability, Battery Life and Connectivity, are automatically computed by Memfault
on the cloud side based on a set of metrics collected by the SDK. The metrics
required for the computation are standardized across all platforms and are now
built-in to all SDK's from
Android 4.13,
MCU 1.5.0,
and
Linux 1.9.0.
We have also added a set of "out-of-the-box" dashboards for monitoring each
vital and new charts and cards to add to your own custom dashboards. The
combination of built-in metrics and out-of-the-box visualizations provides both
existing and new Memfault customers an easy way to start monitoring some of the
most important health and performance indicators across your Fleet. Read about
how to configure the built-in metrics and use the new visualizations in our
technical documentation.
Jira Integration: Connect and automatically sync Memfault Issues with tickets in Jira
Our new Jira integration adds the ability to sync key information from Memfault
Issues with Jira Issues. Users can now create Jira Issues from an Issue in
Memfault and link Memfault Issues to existing Jira Issues from within Memfault.
Once linked, key data is automatically and continuously sync'd with the Jira
Issue including:
Memfault Issue name and Issue status
Trace count and impacted device count
First seen and last seen dates
The Issue status in Memfault (e.g. Open, Resolved, Reopened) will also be
automatically updated based on the Jira Issue status (e.g. Done, Unresolved).
This new integration should make it much easier to work issues identified by
Memfault into your existing development processes in Jira. You can read more
about the integration and how to get set-up in our
technical documentation.
Get all the data you need in one place: Add any chart to any dashboard
It is now possible to add any chart, previously available across any part of
Memfault, into your custom dashboards. All of the charts and cards previously
only available in either the Overview or Device Sets dashboards can now be added
to any dashboard. The three pre-existing dashboards,
Overview,
Metrics
and
Device Sets
have all been consolidated under the Dashboards section of the side nav and can
now be renamed and customized.
This series of changes means that users can get maximum value from all data
sources in Memfault in their custom dashboards.
The list of newly available charts and cards includes:
Active devices
Issue charts
Software Versions
Device sets
Active devices
Device incident alerts
Combine all these data sources into a single dashboard to maximize the relevance
and usefulness of each dashboard and eliminate the need to jump between
dashboards to get the insights you need. You can read more about the changes in
Memfault's Dashboards documentation.
Improved Processing Log: More data, better discoverability, more tools
The Processing Log has been updated to cover more processing-related activity,
improve discoverability and make it easier to take action. The update adds
multiple new filtering options including Hardware Version, software version and
log level (e.g. Errors or Info). It also adds multiple new ways to take action
on the information, including shareable links for each log, a download of the
log for further investigation, and a quick link to upload missing symbol files.
The introduction of the Processing Log will make the initial integration much
easier, providing instant feedback for a developer encountering unexpected
behavior during integration. For customers already using Memfault this will
provide much greater visibility of project related data processing and errors
that might impacting the completeness of their data. Users can read more about
the
Processing Log in Memfault's documentation.
Users can now add two new chart types into their custom dashboards - Reboots and
"Crashes per 10k hours". The Reboots chart gives visibility into the breakdown
of different reboot reasons across each data set. The "Crashes per 10K hours"
provides a calculation of the average number of crashes (unexpected reboots)
across a minimum of 10,000 operating hours.
These new charts give teams a way to track the stability of their devices and
measure and compare software quality across distinct populations. Teams will now
be able to definitively measure software quality improvements or regressions
between versions and even compare software stability across product lines. The
Reboot chart is available to all users but the Crashes per 10k hours chart is
currently only available to MCU customers. You can read more about these
new charts in Memfault's documentation.
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.
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.
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.
Users can now bulk export lists of Devices and associated information as a CSV
file. Use filters as normal to define the desired list of Devices and then
export that list as a CSV. Once the CSV is generated it will be emailed to the
user. This makes it easy to share information on specific groups of Devices to
teams in the organization outside of Memfault for the purpose of further
processing in external tools or scripts for logistics, reporting, etc.
By default on export the CSV will include basic information about the Device
such as serial number, Cohort, software and Hardware Version etc. and a user can
also choose to include Device Attributes in the export if required.
See data in Metric charts as soon as it's received
Data in Metric charts is now available in "real-time" once received. Previously,
data in Metric charts only updated once the day in UTC completes and this would
add some delay in the insights the Metric charts were able to provide. Now the
Metric data collected from devices is visible in Metric charts as soon as it is
received by Memfault.
Memfault Metric charts now display data in "real-time"
This enhancement will allow users to react quicker to undesirable changes in
behavior and provide closer to real-time information during significant events
like software version roll-outs. Currently, this change is only applicable to
Metric charts and does not apply to other chart types (e.g. Issues charts,
Device set charts, etc).
Device Timeline now includes a visualization of the active software version on
the device alongside the metric and traces information. This allows a user to
very quickly associate any metric behavior, crash or reboot event with the
active software version at the time.
As demonstrated in the screenshot, this should also make it very easy to
identify if a change of behavior coincides with a change in software version.
The software version is now displayed by default across all Devices on all
platforms.
We have released a new best practices guide covering the use of the MQTT
protocol with Memfault. Correct set-up for your MQTT implementation is critical
as errors in set-up can result in data loss or data being decoded incorrectly
rendering it impossible for Memfault to deliver accurate insights.
The guide provides a basic introduction to MQTT and specific advice for users
looking to optimize their MQTT stack to ensure reliable data delivery to
Memfault. Topics covered include:
Publishing QoS settings
Topic architecture and recommended topic structure
Minimizing publishing overheads with topic aliases
New Data Aggregation for Metric Charts: Percentiles
Metric Charts now have a new data aggregation available for both chart rollup
options (by Cohort or Software version, and Over Time). This aggregation is
called "Percentiles" and will display the data set broken into the 1st, 5th,
50th, 95th and 99th percentiles. Displaying the metric data as percentiles makes
it easier to understand the prevalence of behaviors (tracked as metrics) across
your fleet.
As an example, if you are seeing significant spikes in battery discharge rates
for a specific software version you can use percentile aggregation to get a
clearer picture of the scale of this problem. Are these undesirable metric
readings I am receiving contained to a small set of samples or is this a wide
scale problem? Conversely, this aggregation should also make it easier to
understand what "normal" actually looks like across your fleet.
This new aggregation is the default view when creating any new metric chart. You
can read more about this new data aggregation in our
Metric Charts documentation.
Best Practices Guide for Android Battery Debugging
Our Developer Experience team have released a new guide designed to help users
get the most from Memfault when identifying and debugging battery issue on
Android devices. This guide provides detail on:
What data the Android SDK can collect
Using metric charts for tracking battery health/performance
Setting fleet and device alerts
Identifying problem devices
Debugging individual devices using Device Timeline
The guide takes into account the recently released set of updates to our
Android SDK with version 4.8.0
which included the addition of new battery usage metrics such as per app battery
usage.
Users can now merge multiple issues together with a few clicks, eliminating the
previously repetitive process of merging each issue independently. This
addresses the scenarios where Memfault's de-duplication algorithm may not group
related issues due to unaccounted for variables within the Issue Signature
making each appear as an independent issue.
Users can now use all of the filtering capabilities within the issues page to
narrow down to a specific issue set and either bulk select or individually
select a set of issues they believe should be merged into one issue. You can
read more about issues and bulk merging in the
Issue Management
documentation.
Android SDK 4.8.0: More OTA control, more metrics and more issue tracking
The most recent
Android SDK 4.8.0
introduces a number of new features for Android customers. Android customers now
get powerful additional controls for the OTA update process, more granular
battery usage metrics and tracking of SELinux violations.
The OTA improvements allow users to control download and install behavior
independently and dependent on additional payload specific metadata and/or
current device condition. For example, you can ensure that devices will
prioritize updates a user has tagged as "critical" for download and will only
install an update if certain battery conditions are met. You can read more about
the specific configurations in Memfault's documentation on
configuring download and install
for OTA updates.
The changes to battery metrics allow users to view the battery usage per app,
distinguish usage in screen-on or screen-off scenarios, and see battery
capacity, all on the device timeline view. This gives much more granular
visibility into battery performance and further enhance users' ability to root
cause issues. You can read more about this in
Memfault's Android Battery Summary Metrics
documentation.
Finally, we added support for tracking
SELinux violations
via Memfault. Tracking these issues will now be possible with all of the same
functionality as the other pre-existing Android issue types.