REMOTE DIAGNOSTIC SERVICE

• US 20090182533A1
• Filed: 01/14/2008
• Published: 07/16/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 01/14/2008
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Apple Inc.
• Original Assignee: Apple Inc.
• Inventors: Seplowitz, Lyle, Neuenschwander, Erik, Albert, Eric
• Application Number:
  US12/014,048
• Publication Number:
  US 20090182533A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 702/185
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0742 in a data processing system embedded in a mobile device, e.g. mobile phones, handheld devices
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0748 in a remote unit communicating with a single-box computer node experiencing an error/fault remote testing G06F11/2294
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/076 by exceeding a count or rate limit, e.g. word- or bit count limit
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0793 Remedial or corrective actions recovery from an exception in an instruction pipeline G06F9/3861; by retry G06F11/1402; for recovering from a failure of a protocol instance or entity H04L69/40
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/2294 by remote test
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0631 using root cause analysis; using analysis of correlation between notifications, alarms or events based on decision criteria, e.g. hierarchy, tree or time analysis
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/5061 characterised by the interaction between service providers and their network customers, e.g. customer relationship management

Abstract

Diagnostic events can be collected on electronic devices at geographically distributed service centers and transmitted to a remote (e.g., network-based) diagnostic service. The diagnostic service can aggregate and analyze the diagnostic events to determine, for example, one or more possible causes of the diagnostic events, and can provide information or guidance to users and/or service personnel for characterizing, resolving or explaining the diagnostic events. In one aspect, log files of diagnostic events captured on devices are sent to the diagnostic service. For each log file, the diagnostic service can compute frequencies of recorded diagnostic events. The computed frequencies can be compared against accepted and/or expected values generated from reference data. The diagnostic service can respond to users and/or service personnel with information or guidance for resolving, characterizing or explaining the diagnostic event based on a result of the comparisons.

Claims

1. A method comprising:

obtaining diagnostic event data and data related to the diagnostic event data or submission thereof from a device;

analyzing the diagnostic event data and related data;

determining one or more possible triggers for the diagnostic events based on results of the analysis; and

determining information or guidance for characterizing, resolving or explaining the diagnostic events.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

receiving the diagnostic event data and additional data related to the diagnostic event data or submission thereof from a host device coupled to the device;

comparing the diagnostic event data with reference data associated with a set of devices having at least one attribute of the device; and

sending the information or guidance to the host device.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein the diagnostic event data spans a period of time.

4. The method of claim 2, where comparing the diagnostic event data with reference data, further comprises:

comparing frequency of occurrence for a diagnostic event with one or more reference values based on field or trend data for the set of devices or other comparisons to relevant data and

identifying pre-defined information or guidance based on a result of the comparisons.

5. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

updating the reference data based on the diagnostic event data obtained from the device.

6. The method of claim 5, where the updating is continuous or automatic.

7. A system comprising:

a device operable for collecting diagnostic event data; and

a diagnostic service operable for obtaining the diagnostic event data and related data from the device or a device submitting on its behalf over a network, for analyzing the diagnostic event data using reference data associated with a set of devices having at least one attribute of the device, and for generating information or guidance for characterizing, resolving or providing explanation regarding the diagnostic event.

8. The system of claim 7, further comprising:

a host device coupled to the device and operable for obtaining the diagnostic event data from the device, establishing a connection with the diagnostic service, sending the diagnostic event data to the diagnostic service, and receiving the information or guidance from the diagnostic service.

9. The system of claim 7, where the diagnostic event data includes one or more of the following diagnostic event data:

time since last restore, application crashes, kernel panics, unclean device resets, low-memory application aborts, modem resets, call failures, dropped calls, battery performance, thermal performance, awake time since last charged and sleep time since last charged.

10. A mobile device comprising:

a processor;

a computer-readable medium coupled to the processor and having instructions stored thereon, which, when executed by the processor causes the processor to perform operations comprising;

recording diagnostic event data, where the diagnostic event data includes a telephony related failure; and

sending the diagnostic event data to another device in response to a request for diagnostic event data.

11. The device of claim 10, where the mobile device is a smart phone or media player.

12. The device of claim 10, where the mobile device includes a touch sensitive display.