Wind River Systems Inc., a major embedded software supplier whose technology is used in systems such as NASA spacecraft, today launched a service to help carriers ensure that their 5G networks are running smoothly.

Wind River operated as an Intel Corp. subsidiary until it was sold in 2018. The company sells a widely used operating system and related products for so-called embedded systems, devices with limited processing needs that are usually part of a bigger machine. Wind River’s software runs inside the InSight Mars lander, industrial systems, car components and, notably, the majority of 5G networks.

It’s that market that the company is targeting with the newly launched Wind River Analytics service. It’s a software product designed to help carriers monitor their so-called edge clouds, a core component of 5G networks.

Edge clouds are servers that carriers set up throughout their 5G networks, often right next to antenna, to handle computing tasks. The servers help process users’ data and run key operational software. In the future, some carriers also plan to use their edge hardware to provide application hosting services to enterprises.

Wind River Analytics sifts through large amounts of data from a carrier’s edge cloud servers to find technical issues. The service can ingest metrics, data points that show trends such as fluctuations in hardware performance, as well as logs that show specific events such as application errors. Wind River Analytics collects these measurements at multiple layers of the stack: It gathers both infrastructure-level data such as processor usage and application-level information.

The collected data is blended to provide a view of the health of a carrier’s edge servers. According to Wind River, carriers can define desired reliability levels and compare them against data from the service to identify problem areas. Administrators have access to visualizations that allow them to dig deeper if necessary. There’s also a trend analysis feature that, according to the software maker, makes it possible to predict future effects of network issues.

“Service providers can identify and address issues before problems arise,” Paul Miller, the vice president of Wind River’s telecommunications business, wrote in a blog post. “By having strong visibility into relevant data along with trend analysis, they can identify and predict the effects of anomalies.”

Over recent quarters, many of the biggest players in the enterprise technology market have introduced products to help carriers with their 5G rollouts. That includes all three major cloud providers. Another player is Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., which last month debuted a platform for managing edge cloud servers.

Photo: Wind River