Automotive industry is currently preforming a radical change from mechanical cars with E/E components towards Software Defined Vehicles. One mayor change and challenge is the shift to constant software evolution over the complete lifecycle of a vehicle, starting with vehicle platform design till taking cars to the scrap yard. DevOps principles and mindset are an important enabler for providing constant updates on vehicle software. On the other side, we see also a seamlessly integrated development environment tool chain, e.g. a combination of web-based applications and Eclipse-based tools, as well as getting constant feedback on current acceptance and usability of new release tool versions as strategic success factors.
Vector Informatik provides with the Automotive Software Factory a new tool chain solution for developing AUTOSAR based Electronic Control Units according to these principles. Telemetry data collection is one of the new focus topics in the DevOps loop.
To fully tailor Vector's Automotive Software Factory to the needs of users, a deep understanding of how software engineers work, what they do, and their environment is essential. Therefore, we need concrete data about the performance and behavior of our software solution in practice and want to raise these in a transparent and customer-favorable way.
To achieve this, we implemented a highly scalable data collection, using Open Telemetry in an Eclipse RCP application and managed K8 in cloud backend. Thereby, we collect user behavior, the software´s performance, and any occurring errors, which we can evaluate to optimize user experience. Our backend solution for evaluations is built on many open-source technologies like Kubernetes, Grafana and Prometheus.
