With device connectivity becoming the rule rather than the exception (practically any electronic device more complex than a flashlight today has some connectivity path to just about every other device on the planet), it makes sense that, like with our desktop computing systems, embedded systems must change to take advantage of that connectivity in both their development and deployment in order to remain competitive. For many engineering teams, the logistics of developing a system that can avail itself of the benefits of a connected-device world are overwhelming, and competitive advantages are left on the table with a nod toward practicality. For some larger, better-funded teams, capitalizing on connectivity means developing proprietary, sometimes one-off systems for managing connected devices in the field. These systems can be expensive and difficult to deploy and operate, and they can be cost-prohibitive because little of their development expense can be amortized across a large number of projects.
Wind River has taken up the challenge to bring the benefits of remote management of embedded devices to a wider audience, standardizing the approach in the process. Their newly announced Wind River Management Suite seeks to address what the company calls a “new imperative” for remote services in deployed devices. With devices becoming more complex and more difficult to debug, market windows and competitive pressures mounting, and equipment margins shrinking in the face of increased competition, building a reliable path for connection-based analysis, management, and repair of remote devices offers a strong competitive weapon.
Wind River’s strategy starts at development time, when serviceability features are designed into the product from its inception. Then, during debug and deployment, run-time management features allow applications on remote devices to be debugged almost as if the hardware were in the lab. Their “Distributed Device Management Platform” allows product developers (OEMs) to set up a “Device Management Server” that acts as a gateway between the OEM company and their customers. Each end customer sets up a “Site Manager” application that allows him to manage his deployed devices and to connect back to the OEM’s Device Management Server.
Through this infrastructure, a wide variety of remote management activities are obviously possible. The first ones of these are in the area of diagnostics and root-cause analysis with an upgraded version of the Wind River Workbench Diagnostics – a package designed to facilitate dynamic instrumentation for the purpose of analyzing and correcting software defects in running systems. New to the suite is Wind River Field Diagnostics, which enables field service engineers to “securely collect and manage operational information from deployed devices.”
Workbench Diagnostics employs what the company calls “sensor point” diagnostics to instrument functions running on a target device without modifying the application source code. These diagnostics can monitor, log, and modify data and functions with minimal intrusion on the running application. There is also a core dump facility through VxWorks that allows system state information to be captured at the point of failure. These facilities make bug analysis faster by providing easy access to data about events leading up to a symptom, and they also make faster work of resolving the issue by allowing real-time iteration on solutions without recompilation and manual instrumentation.
The Workbench Diagnostics are designed with team operation in mind, using a “Workgroup” concept, where multiple team members can use a web-based management console to control multiple devices-under-test. This enables collaboration across teams and throughout the development and deployment cycle by giving a single, centralized access and management methodology for multiple operating devices. The Workbench Diagnostics allow any of the team members to conduct analysis using logs, core files, and other diagnostic information through the gateway provided by the Device Management Server.
What does all this mean in practice? If you’re in early development and you’ve got ten or fifteen prototypes up and running, all twenty members of your team can have near seamless access to the operating devices for diagnosis and debug. Each team member’s access can be managed remotely from the comfort of his own workstation, regardless of the physical location of the devices.
Once your customers get into the loop, using the Field Diagnostics package, each customer can deploy a Site Manager application that gives him the ability to connect back to your Device Management Server via the internet. This allows your team members to work with your customers’ machines remotely, through a secure connection, in the same fashion we described in the previous step. This direct access should theoretically allow you to give better support faster and keep your customers out of much of the error-prone tedium of gathering and reporting diagnostic data back to your team.
These services are obviously just the first salvo of a long string of capabilities that can be added, once the remote management facilities are adopted. By incorporating these capabilities into the Wind River environment, development teams can take advantage of very sophisticated remote management capabilities in their products without having to re-invent the remote management wheel with each new project and for each new application.
Once remote management and diagnosis are the norm, there are obvious opportunities for improved capabilities, such as integrating tightly with version control features of source-code management facilities. The configuration management aspect of diagnosing and managing many machines in customers’ installations, often with different versions of applications, will almost certainly pose a significant challenge for early adopters of the new methodology. The benefits are likely to far outweigh the challenges, however, with direct access for diagnosis of customer-deployed equipment presenting a compelling carrot in differentiating a new product.
The competitive value for Wind River’s customers is obvious, and the new remote management capabilities will be likely to see considerable action in the field. Furthermore, in a climate of increasing pressure from open-source alternatives to classic value-added capabilities from device software tool companies like Wind River, moving up the capability chain into areas like remote management gives the company defensible differentiators to help them hold their strong market position in the ever-changing embedded software tools market.
