Field Support and Diagnostics Questions

Design embedded systems for diagnosability and maintainability in the field through built in diagnostic modes, structured logging, telemetry, health checks, and remote monitoring. Topics include designing log formats and retention policies, circular logs and log rotation, crash dumping, health telemetry and alerting, over the air updates and safe rollback, and on device self tests and recovery modes. Candidates should discuss trade offs between diagnostic verbosity and constraints such as flash usage, power consumption, and telemetry bandwidth, as well as privacy and security concerns for field data. Explain how to make field faults actionable with useful metrics, how to reproduce intermittent failures, and strategies to reduce support costs through better observability and remote repro techniques.