Percepio Advances Automotive Software Observability for SDVs

Observability for automotive embedded software systems
In automotive electronics, particularly body, comfort and control systems, embedded software performance has become a critical engineering concern. As vehicles transition toward software-defined architectures, developers must ensure deterministic behavior, real-time responsiveness and long-term reliability across increasingly complex distributed systems. Within this context, observability tools that provide insight into runtime behavior are becoming essential during development, integration and validation.

Monitoring runtime behavior in software-defined vehicles
Percepio AB has collaborated with BMW Group to support runtime monitoring of embedded software in the IP-Basis Integration Platform used for body and comfort functions in BMW’s next generation of vehicles. The collaboration focuses on applying Percepio’s software observability technology to analyze execution behavior, timing and system performance during development and testing phases.

The solution provides engineers with detailed visibility into task execution, scheduling and interaction patterns within real-time embedded systems. This enables early identification of performance bottlenecks, timing violations and unintended interactions—issues that are increasingly difficult to diagnose as software complexity grows.




Scalability and integration into existing toolchains
A key requirement in modern automotive development is the ability to scale observability across large, modular software platforms while integrating with established data collection infrastructures. The deployed observability solution supports modular monitoring, allowing engineers to define and track application-specific key performance indicators (KPIs) without disrupting existing workflows.

By integrating with BMW’s internal data pipelines, the tool enables continuous analysis of software behavior across different development stages. This supports a more systematic approach to performance optimization and verification as vehicles evolve toward centralized compute platforms and service-oriented architectures.

Supporting the transition to software-defined vehicle architectures
The broader automotive industry is moving toward software-defined vehicles, where functionality, performance and differentiation are increasingly driven by software rather than hardware alone. In this environment, traditional debugging approaches are often insufficient to manage real-time constraints and complex execution paths.

Observability-driven development addresses this challenge by making runtime behavior measurable and transparent throughout the development lifecycle. By visualizing execution traces and timing relationships, engineering teams can reduce integration risk, improve software quality and shorten development cycles—key factors for OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers adapting to SDV platforms.

Expanding embedded observability for automotive applications
Percepio continues to expand its embedded software observability portfolio to address the growing demands of automotive, industrial and edge computing systems. The collaboration demonstrates how observability tools can be applied in large-scale automotive software programs to support reliability, performance validation and long-term maintainability as software complexity increases.

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