Wind River Field Diagnostics

When you're responsible for uptime, you face big challenges and bigger risks. The equipment you sell today may well be in use 10 years from now and still require support. Software shipped with undetected faults can break your company. At the same time, the likelihood of such faults is increasing. The software content in devices and equipment is doubling every two years, while new technologies such as multiprocessing are making development more error-prone.

Wind River Field Diagnostics provides a security net for these risks. It enables original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to remotely diagnose and fix defects in deployed devices with minimal downtime. It also gives them a common toolset and infrastructure to link their development, test, and field support teams throughout the equipment life cycle.

Developers Support Managers

Developers

The Challenges

When defects are reported from the field, often there is only a vague description of the problem without supporting evidence. Recreating the problem back in the lab is difficult, which leaves developers guessing whether the issue was caused by the software, the hardware, or even by misuse of the device by the customer. These support incidents become open-ended resource drains whose time-to-resolution cannot be accurately estimated, so development teams choose to avoid them until they are escalated by management.

Field Diagnostics

Wind River Field Diagnostics captures the data developers need to reproduce problems. When devices fail, core files are generated to allow developers to inspect the software at the time of failure. If the device is running, field support personnel can apply sensorpoints, written by developers, in order to instrument the device and run diagnostic tests. This data is posted on a server, so developers can instantly access it and recreate the problem locally. To resolve the problem, developers upload small patchpoint files, which patch the device software without rebuilding the code base or even restarting the device.

Managers

The Challenges

The customer wants performance, features, and uptime. The executive team wants the same things—faster, cheaper, better—in order to drive business, optimize margins, win new customers, and hold on to the customers they already have. What gets in the way of realizing these goals? Resource constraints. Redundant effort. Complexity.

Support is too often an expensive afterthought, with at least 10% of calls resolved only after an engineer has gone onsite to collect data, and an engineer or two back at headquarters have invested hours or days replicating a problem before it can be solved. Increasingly, the ability to update and upgrade deployed software differentiates OEMs, but the engineering effort to put remote monitoring and maintenance systems in place is beyond any but the largest, richest companies.

Field Diagnostics

Our Field Diagnostics solution links development and support teams across the whole product life cycle. It provides a common infrastructure and toolset for debugging single applications, testing integrated systems, and supporting products in the field. Combining unique diagnostics technology with a secure, distributed information management system, Field Diagnostics enables your company to build a knowledge library that increases in value over time, even after the engineers who designed your product have moved on.

Field Diagnostics Complements Test Management

Field Diagnostics is designed to be used together with its sister product, Wind River Test Management, in order to leverage lab tests for deployed products in the field to further increase productivity.

Support

The Challenges

No matter how well a device is tested before it ships, it's hard to simulate field conditions in the lab. Instability, performance degradation, intermittent failures—any or all of these will probably happen sometime between product release and end of life. The usual ways of supporting deployed devices—call centers, dispatched technicians, the process of trying to replicate failure conditions—are slow, often inconclusive, and always costly. Today, the hardest cases often get referred back to development for diagnosis and resolution, undermining a company's ability to deliver new products on time. Field engineers too often have more responsibility than resources and too little intimate knowledge of the software they're expected to support, while customers are understandably anxious to have their issues resolved.

Field Diagnostics

With Wind River Field Diagnostics, applications are designed for supportability. Sensorpoints written alongside the code can be "turned on" in the field to remotely diagnose faults and collect real-time data from deployed products. Call center personnel can identify and correct a wider range of problems with sensorpoints. When issues require escalation, support engineers can access data from running software, perform fact-based analysis, and quickly send a patch to the support team. Using patchpoint technology, the patch can be applied to running applications in the field without restarting the device, which minimizes downtime. Once support and/or maintenance is complete, support engineers disable the sensorpoints they've used to instrument the system. This minimizes impact on system performance and ensures device security. Information aggregated from deployed devices becomes a real-world knowledge base, accessible by field and test engineers as well as teams charged with developing next-generation products. Access to model- and configuration-specific sensorpoints and associated fixes empowers support engineers to diagnose and resolve more and more complicated software issues, in shorter time.