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What is nRF Cloud

nRF Cloud is a device management platform that lets you and your team continuously monitor devices, remotely debug firmware issues, and deploy OTA updates to your fleet. It is paired with device-side data collection that is designed for the constraints of embedded systems, fitting into the flash, RAM, and bandwidth your device has available. It is also built to tolerate low and intermittent connectivity: if a device can only send a small amount of data, you can ration it into chunks of a size you choose at your required cadence, and nRF Cloud reassembles it on the other side.

In this first topic, we will review the primary features of nRF Cloud at a high level. nRF Cloud also includes location services, message routing services, and device identity support. These features will not be covered in this course, but you can explore them on the nRF Cloud Docs page.

Remote Debugging

The nRF Connect SDK embeds the Memfault Firmware SDK as a module. With a few Kconfig changes, you can enable the SDK to capture the system state at the time of a crash and store it in non-volatile memory. Once the data is uploaded on boot, nRF Cloud decodes it using your symbol file (ELF file that is already generated when you build your project). Instead of shipping a device back to your facility and attaching a debug probe, you get a complete view into the captured state: threads, registers, local and global variables, and the logs leading up to the fault.

Capturing crash data remotely helps especially in cases where reproducing the error locally is challenging and may require a number of specific environmental conditions. This changes how support and engineering teams work together. Imagine a support agent filing a ticket that already links directly to the affected device, or even to the exact crash. Engineering can diagnose the problem without ever having the hardware in hand.

The data collected in a coredump is under your control, and any personally identifiable information (PII) can be scrubbed from the collected data with utilities in the SDK. Lesson 3 will dig deeper into the kind of data that can be included in a coredump, and how to inspect one in nRF Cloud.

Coredump view in nRF Cloud

Note

Details on the exact Kconfig settings that will enable nRF Cloud in your application are not covered in this course. For more hands-on guidance, see the nRF Cloud Quickstart guides.

Over-the-air (OTA) updates

As your fleet scales, having robust infrastructure to deliver OTA updates is critical. With increasing regulation on updatability for vulnerability patching, such as the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), some companies must now be able to update devices. nRF Cloud is built to deliver firmware to millions of devices, taking the burden off hardware teams to also maintain an OTA update service.

Traditionally, preparing a firmware over-the-air update means handing a device to QA, waiting for bugs to surface, fixing them, and repeating. nRF Cloud also aims to expedite that process with a controlled, measurable rollout workflow:

  1. Split your devices into groups (in nRF Cloud, the technical term is “cohorts”: groups for OTA targeting. This will be covered in detail in Lesson 2 and Lesson 4), for example a production group and a beta group.
  2. Configure an automatic update for the beta group.
  3. Measure success against real data, such as reboot or crash counts.
  4. Once you’re confident, roll the update out to production.

The platform supports both this streamlined flow and more advanced scenarios such as staged rollouts (targeting only a fraction of your population at a time) and delta releases (shipping only the difference between two versions to save bandwidth). The result is higher release velocity with less risk.

nRF Cloud OTA Releases

Monitoring

Device metrics can give you anything from low-level details on how different hardware components are functioning to insights on which features are being used. To collect new data from your devices, you add a metric with a few lines of code; the platform handles transport and the data pipeline. Once metrics are flowing, they unlock insight at two levels:

  • Per-device: a timeline for every individual device showing its metrics over time alongside reboots and crashes. This view can assist with inspection for a support use case in particular, where there is a specific misbehaving device. nRF Cloud provides a set of built-in metrics that target the key areas of performance, such as memory usage, CPU usage, and connectivity parameters.
  • Fleet-wide: dashboard charts aggregate a metric across your whole fleet, and can be sliced by software version, cohorts, or metadata called attributes (for example, the country a device is deployed in). This view enables understanding of the fleet performance and trends at a higher level. Notably, nRF Cloud provides a set of built-in insights called Device Vitals, which capture the top insights that give you meaningful fleet-wide rollups out of the box.
nRF Cloud Device Vitals comparison between firmware releases

You can also proactively monitor your fleet using alerts and Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) scanning. You can configure alerts to notify your team of unexpected metric values, offline devices, and changes in reboot volume. nRF Cloud’s CVE scanning tool enables continuous scanning of software components in your reported software bill of materials (SBOM) for known vulnerabilities, so you can fix vulnerabilities quickly and remain compliant.

More on this

These capabilities reinforce each other. Alerts and CVE scanning notify you that something is wrong across the fleet, debugging tells you why on a specific device, OTA updates let you ship the fix, and metric dashboards show you that the fleet has recovered and is performing as expected. We’ll have a closer look at proactive monitoring in Lesson 5.

Location Services and Secure Onboarding

nRF Cloud also provides location services, via Wi-Fi or cellular, and Assisted/Predicted GNSS functionality to devices requiring positioning information. This course will not cover these features, but see more information here: Location Services | nRF Cloud Docs

The platform also provides Secure Onboarding, which ensures only authenticated devices can access nRF Cloud. This works in combination with Nordic Identity, where devices have a credential set during manufacturing that enables nRF Cloud to trust the device. Learn more here: Secure Device Onboarding | nRF Cloud Docs .

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