Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’ve been building embedded systems for a while, chances are you know Percepio for Tracealyzer. And we’re proud of that. For over a decade, Tracealyzer has been helping engineers visualize and solve complex RTOS issues faster, with over 30 ways to slice and understand system behavior. But in 2025, embedded systems demand more. They’re always on. Always connected. And increasingly, always business-critical.

Regulations like the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) are top of mind for many in the embedded software world right now, and understandably so. The pressure to comply is real, especially for teams already juggling tight schedules and complex development environments. But as disruptive as these mandates might feel, they also present an opportunity and perhaps a necessary nudge to adopt better habits that can strengthen the software we build, far beyond compliance.

If you’ve been working with Zephyr RTOS, you know how powerful and flexible it is for embedded development. At Percepio, we appreciate Zephyr’s hardware abstraction and kernel architecture, which make it easy to get up and running on a wide range of hardware. Now, we have exciting news for developers looking to improve their Zephyr debugging and performance analysis: we’ve validated that Percepio Tracealyzer works on over 600 Zephyr-supported development boards!

The world of embedded systems evolves, with devices growing ever more sophisticated and software-centric. In this new landscape, with highly interconnected environments that defy traditional testing and debugging approaches, a reactive, fire-fighting mentality is no longer sufficient. Developers need a proactive strategy to gain continuous visibility into system behaviour—a strategy known as observability-driven development (ODD).

FreeRTOS 11 introduced symmetric multi-processing (SMP) support in the mainline kernel, meaning a single FreeRTOS kernel is managing multiple processor cores. This allows for high performance but also makes the runtime system more complex, meaning higher risk of issues and more difficult debugging. System tracing with Percepio Tracealyzer can offer an effective remedy by providing insight into the system execution.

There have been significant improvements in Tracealyzer over the last years. If you haven’t tried it in a while—or if you’re just getting started—here are some tips and tricks that can be handy when analyzing your FreeRTOS applications. As you may know, the TraceRecorder library automatically records task scheduling and FreeRTOS API calls using the standard trace hooks in the FreeRTOS kernel.

You hear us at Percepio talking about Observability a lot. For customers using our award-winning Tracealyzer tool, this might sound a bit strange – isn’t Tracealyzer about diagnostics, debugging and profiling? Mostly, yes, but let me share why we are putting so much emphasis on our Continuous Observability solutions.

Software complexity grows exponentially, developer efficiency grows far slower. And debugging often takes up 20-50% of development time. More complex, connected systems means increased data flow at the edge, and in the cloud. That leads to increased exposure to vulnerabilities, cyber threats, malfunctions, and bugs with risks that are hard to assess.

Embedded projects take time. No surprise there. Market research indicates that projects often extend well beyond a year. After completion, there is a high risk of intense maintenance and bug-fixing as reality kicks in, so you need tools that assist you all the way from development to deployment.

Tracealyzer version 4.9.0 is now available for download. Installation on Linux has been greatly simplified. A new “standalone” installation package includes everything needed to run the software. Linux users no longer need to install dependencies like Mono or libgconf to use Tracealyzer. An updated new installation guide is provided for Linux users, that is much shorter than before. New users are up and running in a few minutes.