“What Gets Measured, Gets Improved” said by Legendary Peter Drucker and rightly so. Unless you know how something is performing, you can’t even plan to improve it. And this has become all the more important in current age of millions of applications and devices which operate all around us. If one wants to improve the usability and functioning of that App or that remote sensor, she would need to collect lot of data and this is where Telemetry” comes into picture.
What is Telemetry?
The literal meaning of Telemetry is “to measure remotely”. As far the definition goes:
Telemetry is an automated communications process by which measurements and other data are collected at remote or inaccessible points and transmitted to receiving equipment for monitoring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemetry
Telemetry has widespread application ranging from the manufacturing industry, agriculture, defense to software systems. By collecting data from remote systems has enabled several concepts to be materialized, not just as an academic exercise, but also in a commercial sense.
How Telemetry Works?
In general, Telemetry works through sensors or agents deployed at remote locations. Based on the application, the sensors can measure physical parameters such as heat, humidity, light or wind speed. Or they can measure
In the software context, Telemetry has made several things possible including auto-scaling and auto-healing of server farms, triggering alarms or alerts, etc. In many cases, the data is received in the form of log messages or REST API calls by the agents deployed on remote systems. The data could also be collected at edge locations and then send to the central server for further processing and analysis.
Benefits of Telemetry
Collection of various parameters on a central server and then analyzing them to identify patterns, possible problem areas and fixing them is the biggest benefit of Telemetry. In this age of global market, your consumers could be anywhere in the world and it is practically impossible to reach out to each one of them for the feedback. Telemetry makes it possible to gather data from their usage patterns and make enhancements to your application or offering.