Introducing expanded Remote Diagnostics with Fleet Health and Enhanced Vitals

View all the mission-critical metrics that matter most to the normal functioning of your fleet.

Will Hart article author avatarWill HartNovember 05, 2019
Introducing expanded Remote Diagnostics with Fleet Health and Enhanced Vitals

According to the Particle 2019 State of IoT report, 55% of IoT fleet managers report that troubleshooting device connectivity issues is the most difficult part of their job. Lack of physical access, varying connectivity environments, and the challenge of maintaining complex interactions of multiple systems into a single fleet, all pose mission-critical challenges to overcome.

Today, the Particle Console adds two new Remote Diagnostics features to help you monitor your device vitals and overall fleet health. Available today to all customers, Fleet Health provides you with high-level insights about the state of your deployment, and Device Vitals lets you to dive into the device-specific details.

  • Fleet Health dashboard — brings together all the mission-critical metrics that matter most to the normal functioning of your devices.
  • Device Vitals dashboard — helps you visualize your device’s health right from the Particle Console.

Together these new dashboards give you a full range of diagnostic tools to better manage your fleet- and device-level health. All customers have access to Device Vitals, including our new cellular connectivity metrics. Customers with products will now have access to a new Fleet Health in their Particle Console — with additional fleet metrics available to enterprise customers.

Device Vitals dashboard: zoom-in on a solution

The Device Vitals dashboard gives you device-specific information that's critical for managing your IoT fleet.

The Device Vitals dashboard gives you device-specific information that’s critical for managing your IoT fleet.

Identifying the source of an IoT network ailment begins with determining the scope of the problem. Using the new Device Vitals dashboard, you can drill down into the device and cellular specific information necessary to determine the scope of your problem.

Critical information such as signal strength, signal quality, round-trip time from device to cloud, device memory usage, and the state of battery charge, are all viewable in one convenient dashboard. And, if you’re devices are running Device OS version 1.2.1 or higher, your fleet is already configured. To see the new health dashboards, log into the Particle Console.

Visible device vitals include:

  • Signal strength: the strength of the device’s connection to the Cellular or Wi-Fi network measured in decibels of signal power.
  • Signal quality: a measure of the relative noise, or likelihood of interference, of the signal.
  • Round-Trip time: the amount of time it takes for a device to successfully respond to a message sent by the Particle Device Cloud.
  • Memory usage: The amount of memory used by the device compared to how much is available.
  • Battery charge: the state of charge of a device’s battery.

Plus, quickly identify critical cellular information for connectivity troubleshooting including Cellular Carrier details, the type of cellular connection (2G/3G, LTE) and the unique identifier for the cellular tower. Read more in the docs here.

Fleet Health dashboard: visibility into your fleet-health

The new Fleet Health dashboard displays the critical information you need about your fleet in an at-a-glance presentation.

The new Fleet Health dashboard displays the critical information you need about your fleet in an at-a-glance presentation. Additional features like event and integration traffic volume, function calls, and variable requests, are available for enterprise customers.

The Fleet Health dashboard provides a 30,000 foot view of your fleet’s health, and brings together all the mission-critical metrics that matter most to the normal functioning of your devices. With increased visibility, you’ll be able to reduce downtime by maximizing your troubleshooting efficiency.

With the Fleet Health dashboard, you and your team can quickly answer how many active devices are in your fleet and their real-time status. Additional visibility is provided for data consumption, publish and subscribe event traffic, integration traffic, plus how many function calls and variable requests are made to each device of your fleet.

Visible fleet-health metrics include

  • Data consumption: easily determine the amount of data your fleet has consumed in its current billing period.
  • Event traffic: view how many publish and subscribe events have passed from your fleet to the Particle Device Cloud.
  • Integration traffic: monitor the amount of traffic used by a 3rd-party integration along with success and failure rates.
  • Functions and variables rates: see how many cloud function calls and variable requests have been made by your fleet.

Fleet health metrics can also be filtered by device group, Device OS version, customer firmware version, and time period, giving you flexibility while investigating your fleet’s health. Fleet health is now standard for all customers running Device OS 1.2.1 or later.

Access to additional diagnostic features such as event and integration traffic volume, function calls, and variable requests, are available for enterprise customers. To learn more about Enterprise-only features, please contact a member of our Sales Team.

Keeping your fleet healthy with diagnostic information

This is just the first release in tools to help you best manage your scaling fleet, allowing you to identify and solve problems before they even happen. To experience these new product improvements or yourself, login to your Particle Console and select your product to see how your fleet is performing.