Product Overview
nRF Cloud Express Course
Details
Prerequisites
- None
Hardware Requirements
This course has no hardware requirements. All lessons, including the optional hands-on components, can be completed using the nRF Cloud sandbox environment; no physical hardware is required.
System Requirements
- A computer running Windows, macOS, or Linux
- An up-to-date web browser
Course description
The nRF Cloud Express course is a self-paced, optionally hands-on online course that gives you a deep understanding of Nordic Semiconductor's nRF Cloud platform. nRF Cloud helps embedded teams manage a device fleet, deliver over-the-air (OTA) updates, and monitor devices in the field so they can ship reliable products and catch issues early.
This course walks through the full lifecycle of a connected device: how data moves from a device to the cloud, how that data is collected and aggregated across a fleet, how to deploy firmware updates, how to monitor devices proactively, and recommendations for Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) compliance.
This course requires no hardware or software to follow along. Several lessons include optional hands-on components you can try in the nRF Cloud sandbox environment, but each lesson is fully informative without it.
What you'll learn
Understand what nRF Cloud is, how data flows from device to cloud, and how customers use the platform to manage a device fleet.
Learn how to connect a device to nRF Cloud and configure a project, including required identifiers and settings.
Examine how to inspect a single device's timeline, debug issues and logs, and interpret built-in Device Vitals.
Explore fleet-wide dashboards and charts, and learn how to group devices into cohorts for safe OTA rollouts.
Gain a practical understanding of firmware OTA delivery, from full and delta releases to staged rollouts.
Learn how to set up proactive alerts and track Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) through software bill of materials (SBOM) upload and CVE scanning for compliance.
Who should enroll in this course?
The course is for anyone interested in learning what nRF Cloud has to offer. It's ideal for embedded developers, product managers, and product architects evaluating cloud tooling for a new or existing device fleet.
Estimated time
The estimated time needed to finish this course is about two to three hours.
Learning Objectives
- Understand nRF Cloud's core capabilities: remote debugging, OTA delivery, and fleet monitoring.
- Learn how device data flows from a device into a project and organization, and how it is aggregated into issues and fleet-wide metrics.
- Explore examples of how customers typically integrate and adopt nRF Cloud for a device fleet.
- Understand how devices route data to nRF Cloud using device identifiers and project keys.
- Learn about project settings and the organizational hierarchy: organization, project, fleet, cohorts, and device sets.
- Highlight the identifiers used to distinguish devices and software builds: software version, software type, hardware version, and device ID.
- Learn about the Processing Log for inspecting incoming data and detecting errors when first integrating.
- Inspect a metric payload in a device’s Processing Log, and understand built-in metrics on Nordic platforms.
- Learn how to use the device timeline to inspect a single device's behavior and correlate custom debugging data.
- Understand how issues are grouped from individual traces, and how to inspect issue- and trace-level detail such as backtraces, registers, and logs.
- Gain a working understanding of Device Vitals: Battery Life, Stable Hours, Connectivity, and Flash Wear, and how to use device search to find and filter devices.
- (Optional) Practice correlating low device sync success with crashes using the device timeline.
- Learn how to build custom dashboards and use chart types, Comparison Mode, and chart normalization to compare device populations fairly.
- Explore fleet-wide log search for investigating issues across devices.
- Understand firmware OTA delivery, including full versus delta releases and staged rollouts.
- Learn how to group devices into cohorts for OTA targeting, as distinct from attributes used for device metadata.
- (Optional) Practice spotting where a regression was introduced using the dashboard’s version filters, and then drilling down to the device-level view from Lesson 3.
- Understand the four alert types: fleet threshold, device threshold, device offline, and reboot.
- Explore how saved issue searches and summaries can help with monitoring ongoing problems.
- Learn how to upload an SBOM and use CVE scanning to identify and triage vulnerabilities for compliance.
- (Optional) Practice inspecting alerting devices, then seeing how a fix shipped over-the-air shows a rebound in reliability in the Device Vitals dashboard.
- (Optional) Practice triaging CVEs affecting a particular firmware version.
Course Content
Details
Prerequisites
- None
Hardware Requirements
This course has no hardware requirements. All lessons, including the optional hands-on components, can be completed using the nRF Cloud sandbox environment; no physical hardware is required.
System Requirements
- A computer running Windows, macOS, or Linux
- An up-to-date web browser
