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.
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
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.
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.
You can now observe the development of your device Fleet even better via fully
customizable Device Sets
(Fleet→Device Sets). Based on your project-specific
Device Attributes and Time-Series Metrics each set
describes devices that match unique criteria such as "devices that exceeded 40MB
of daily network traffic" or "devices in the UK".
You can create a Device Set from any existing device search and use them to
track key performance indicators over time.
The new chart type Issue Chart
complements the custom Metrics Chart (Dashboards→Metrics) and plots the number
of occurrences of a specific group of issues over time. When combined with the
recently introduced
Chart Comparison Mode, Issue Charts
allow for sophisticated tracking of ongoing software updates to answer the
relevant question "does my software update fix the bugs it claims to fix?"
Since the introduction of Custom Metrics, Memfault
provided various ways to define charts for plotting Fleet-wide aggregations
(sum, count, min, max, mean). These charts are often used to visualize trends
over time (e.g. "hours between recharge") or to detect anomalies (e.g. "attempt
until successful connect") for a subset of the Fleet. The controls in the
top-right corner allow for ad-hoc filtering by Cohort and/or software version.
With the advent of the
Chart Comparison Mode, users can
now apply up to 4 such filters simultaneously to plot the resulting data series
side-by-side inside each custom chart.
Use this feature to visually compare your beta Cohort against the production
Fleet or to see at a glance if there are any regressions for key metrics between
the last software versions.
Sometimes, products span across multiple devices: Each pair of wireless earplugs
has a left and right version, for each smart home installation there may be
multiple components in a network, or some related device information lives
outside of Memfault, and your workflow benefits from quick navigation to another
software system.
Memfault's Linked Devices provide convenient navigation in these scenarios. It
builds these connections by looking at Device Attributes that can be edited in
the UI, updated via API, or sent from devices at any time.
This optional debugging feature tags all heap allocations with their respective
size, address, and location of code that allocated it. Use it to understand
memory distribution, heap fragmentation, or to find memory leaks in an
out-of-memory situation in the field.
Memfault's frontend is now more upfront with the visualization of
quotas and rate limits that may affect large
projects.
When managing
Timeseries Metrics and Device Attributes, Memfault
informs about the number of remaining metrics for Fleet-wide analytics. The
dedicated page at Settings→Quotas presents an overview.
Memfault's Firmware SDK now includes support for what we are calling "Compact
Logs". It is similar to Zephyr's
dictionary-based-logging
and a few other implementations in other RTOS's, but we think we've hit the
perfect balance of performance, features, ease-of-use, and size compression.
Let's walk through a quick example of what compact logs are. Here is a log line
that a user of the Memfault SDK could write:
With a generic formatted string implementation such as printf, we would need
to include the entire string contents in our log buffer or storage. In total,
this requires 41 bytes.
Once developers run out of firmware code space, a common pattern is to start
shortening log lines or removing them entirely. We believe this is a bad
practice! We should be able to keep our useful log lines and make the messages
as long as necessary!
This is why we created compact logs. With compact logs, every log "string" is
placed in a special section in the ELF file and we just need to reference each
log line with an index, or ID.
For a compact log, we just need to encode an integer ID for the string portion
and the arguments to be serialized. In this example, this information requires
just 5 bytes.
00000000: 8218 8805 ....
In this example, we can reduce the storage occupied by 88%! For a firmware that
contains 100-1000 log lines, these savings are dramatic.
Along with compact logs, we've been busy adding more ways to filter and slice
the data in our application and building up some exciting features related to
Custom Events and State. More news to come next month.
Nordic Semiconductor's nRF Connect SDK now has Memfault's SDK built-in, allowing
for customers and users of Nordic's chips and tools to integrate and use
Memfault in minutes.
One of Memfault's most capable features is Metrics. With Metrics, you can
determine how specific metrics on a single device correlate with each other to
root cause performance and power regressions, or aggregate them on a Fleet level
and determine whether the health of your Fleet of devices is improving over
time!
We're announcing new features today which should help make our metrics feature
more usable.
First, users can now view all the Metric names that have been received from
Heartbeat events in the Settings → Metrics page. This allows for easy
auditing of metric names and configurations.
If you find any that are stale or shouldn't be tracked anymore, you can archive
them.
When Edit is clicked, users can configure the valid ranges for the metric,
which will improve the displayed charts by normalizing the Y-axis to possible
values. An example of where this could be useful is battery life, where the min
and max values are 0-100.
Users can also specify a single value for Memfault to ignore, such as
0xffffffff, which can represent the absence of a value.
These new features will enable developers and customer support representatives
to more easily dig into the health of a single device and the entire Fleet.
That's not all though! We've made more improvements to symbol file uploading,
bugreport filtering, and the archiving of software versions.
The day you have all (maybe) been waiting for is here! Anyone can now sign up
for a free trial of Memfault! There is no sales team in your way of getting your
devices integrated with Memfault and monitoring your Fleet of devices.
