But as products become more complex and teams spread across sites, those processes become harder to manage. In a recent NI webinar, Adam Arnesen and Josh Prewitt, both Chief NI Product Managers for NI SystemLink, showed how the new SystemLink Full and Professional extend the capabilities of SystemLink to help test teams plan, manage, and optimize tests from a single platform.

Why It Matters

Test data alone rarely tells the whole story behind a failure. Engineers also need operational context: which system ran the test? What software version was installed? Were the instruments within calibration? How has the test bench performed historically? What other conditions could have affected the result?

When that information is scattered across email threads, spreadsheets, and disconnected tools, engineers spend valuable time searching for answers. SystemLink connects test data with the systems, assets, software, and workflows that generated it, giving teams the context they need to answer questions in minutes instead of hours.

Key Takeaways

• Work with NI Nigel AI in context. Nigel AI is embedded in SystemLink and can help engineers find available systems, understand instruments, summarize system health, locate test software versions, explore test data, and investigate failures.
• Plan work across the lab. A new work item service brings scheduling into SystemLink, giving teams a lab-wide view of reservations, maintenance, calibration, and planned tests.
• Keep test systems in a known-good state. Software states capture the feeds and packages a system needs and can be deployed across multiple testers.
• Centralize test specifications. SystemLink Base, Full, and Professional editions allow teams to manage specifications in SystemLink so test software can retrieve limits from a single source of truth rather than hard-coding them into individual test sequences.

Planning: Find the Right System and Know It Is Ready

A familiar challenge in many labs is simply knowing which test system is available and ready for the next job. Sticky notes on instruments may be outdated, and determining whether a station is free, healthy, calibrated, and properly configured can mean walking the lab or contacting colleagues.

During the demonstration, Josh asked Nigel to find a connected system equipped with both a digital multimeter (DMM) and an oscilloscope. Nigel used system and asset information in SystemLink, together with product information from ni.com, to identify matching stations.

The team then demonstrated how engineers can investigate an individual instrument and check system health, including processor load, memory and disk usage, and calibration alarms.

SystemLink’s work item service adds another piece of operational context by bringing reservations, maintenance, calibration, and test plans into a common view. Teams can see scheduling conflicts and move work to another available system instead of managing availability through disconnected calendars or spreadsheets.

Managing Systems: Keeping Software in a Known Good State

Knowing that a system is available is only part of the challenge. Engineers also need confidence that it has the right software and configuration for the job.

SystemLink provides visibility into the software installed on each system, including packages and available updates. Teams can also manage their own software and configuration content, including configuration files, applications built with NI LabVIEW and NI TestStand, and Python scripts or other third-party software packaged with NI Package Builder.

Validated software can be published from a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline into SystemLink and then deployed to test systems.

For repetitive configuration tasks, software states act as a recipe for a known-good system. A state captures the feeds and packages a system needs and applies only what does not already match the desired configuration. This makes it easier to standardize multiple testers or prepare a shared bench for a particular engineer or test.

Analyzing Results: From Failures to Root Cause

Optimize: Turn Test Data into Faster Answers

Test teams don’t just need more data. They need to understand why something failed and what to do next.

SystemLink brings test results together with the operational context surrounding them. Specifications in the Full and Professional editions can store expected limits and conditions, while TestStand integrations and APIs allow test sequences to retrieve those values rather than embedding them directly in the test code.

The Data Spaces viewer lets engineers explore parametric and waveform data and visualize results alongside specification limits.

In the webinar demonstration, Josh used Nigel to investigate failures in battery-cell test data. The analysis identified temperature as an important factor in the failures and also revealed differences between test benches that warranted further investigation.

Instead of manually exporting data, building charts, and then trying to reconstruct what happened, engineers can investigate results alongside the context of the systems and tests that produced them. Saved Data Spaces can retain filters, and comments with @mentions make it easier to share an investigation with colleagues.

Editions, Availability, and Getting Started

SystemLink now comes in four editions. Base covers core systems management, Full adds specifications and scheduling, and Professional adds automation that runs on a schedule or on an event such as a new failed result. Enterprise remains the option for global fleets of hundreds or thousands of testers.

Nigel is optional. It ships with SystemLink but must be enabled; entitlements come as seats with each package, and disconnected systems can run without it. Private hosted deployment is on the roadmap, and Adam confirmed SystemLink will be a Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) compliant product at release.

Learn More

Visit the NI SystemLink section on ni.com to learn more about planning, managing, and optimizing tests with a trusted, centralized platform, or watch the full webinar on demand.