Percepio Detect: Catching Embedded Software Issues Before They Become Failures

Embedded applications can pass unit tests, perform reliably in the lab, and still encounter unexpected failures after hours of operation. Occasional timing problems, stalled RTOS tasks, and intermittent crashes can be difficult to reproduce, making debugging both time-consuming and challenging.

What if developers could capture these issues as they happen, rather than spending hours trying to recreate them?

Continuous Observability with Percepio Detect

Percepio Detect brings Continuous Observability to embedded software testing, automatically monitoring runtime behavior, detecting anomalies, and capturing diagnostic information when issues occur.

Supporting FreeRTOS, Zephyr, and bare-metal applications on Arm Cortex-M devices, Detect helps identify stability problems during extended testing.

It also provides a centralized dashboard where development teams can monitor multiple devices and access reported issues, including firmware versions, fault information, and diagnostic attachments.

Detect can be deployed locally using Docker, allowing organizations to maintain their diagnostic data within their own network without relying on external cloud services.

From Detection to Detailed Diagnostics

When an issue occurs, Detect captures relevant diagnostic information, including execution traces and core dumps.

Developers can investigate crashes through call stacks, function parameters, variables, processor registers, and disassembly, helping identify where the failure occurred and what the system was doing.

Identifying Problems Before They Become Failures

Consider an RTOS task that normally completes within 10 milliseconds but occasionally takes 18 milliseconds under heavier processing loads.

Although the task still meets its 20-millisecond deadline, the reduced timing margin could indicate a potential problem.

Detect's Stopwatch feature measures execution time between defined points and generates alerts when configured thresholds are exceeded.

Similarly, TaskMonitor monitors individual RTOS task CPU utilization, helping identify unexpected activity, stalled tasks, and excessive CPU consumption.

These capabilities can reveal hidden risks before they develop into more serious failures.

Continuous Testing and Integration

Detect supports integration into continuous integration and continuous testing (CI/CT) workflows, enabling automated stability monitoring during extended testing.

Diagnostic data can be collected through serial communication or other supported interfaces and made available through the centralized dashboard.

Developers can then use Percepio Tracealyzer to examine recorded execution traces, analyze task scheduling, and investigate timing or synchronization issues.

With Detect 2026.1 introducing native Zephyr RTOS support and enhanced non-fatal diagnostic capture, Percepio continues to expand its observability capabilities for embedded development teams.

By identifying runtime anomalies and preserving diagnostic evidence, Percepio Detect helps reduce debugging effort and improve embedded software reliability.

To learn more about Percepio Detect and how it can support your embedded software testing, contact Hrutik Champaneri at hrutik.champaneri@joraltechnologies.com.