Configuring the Product, Application and Version

With ASP.NET applications the Agent can't reasonably determine a useful Product, Application and Version to categorize the sessions with so it is highly recommended that you configure them explicitly in the web.config file.  If not, it will use a default product name of ASPNET and the virtual directory name for the web site as the Application name.  Likewise, there is no lead assembly to automatically pull file version information from so the version will be left as 0.0 by default.

• See the specific options for configuring Product, Application and Version.

Because of the nature of ASP.NET WebForms applications it is not recommended that you attempt to configure Loupe through code by intercepting the Initializing event.  Instead, stick with configuration in the Web.Config file.  For ASP.NET MVC applications where you are not using the Loupe Agent for ASP.NET WebForms you can use the Initializing event or web.config

• See an overview of configuring the Loupe Agent in your Web.Config.

How Loupe Creates Sessions

The Loupe Agent defines a session as matching the lifespan of a single Application Domain.  Each time the IIS App Pool closes after inactivity or recycle after a certain number of requests that will end the current Loupe session.  You can configure how often this is using the IIS Administration tool.  This behavior will get a sense of how often your application is recycling and why (the last message recorded by the Loupe Agent for ASP.NET indicates why the session is ending). 

Accessing Session Data

You can always perform analysis right on the web server using the Loupe Desktop, but in most environments you'll want to send the data to a Loupe Server so you can dig deep.

For more information on all of the different ways you can package up data for analysis, see Developer's Guide - Packaging and Sending Data. 

Record Extended Application User Information

If your web site authenticates users you can record additional information about each user such as their full name, contact information, and organization.  To do this, subscribe to the ResolveApplicationUser Event and populate an ApplicationUser from your user identity information.  For more details, see Developer's Guide - Capturing Application Users.

Getting Sessions from your Web Site

Using Loupe Server

We recommend you enable the Auto Send Sessions option which will in turn implicitly enable Auto Send On Error.  This will automatically send to the server the latest session information from your application every time there is an error (subject to a 5 minute safety interval which prevents the server from sending frequently when a server is experiencing many errors)

Without Loupe Server

Until the web site recycles the session data will stay on the server unless it is packaged from within the web site process itself.  It's a best practice to do two minor code additions within your web site:

1. Subscribe to the MessageAlert event to automatically submit session data when there's an error.
2. Add to the administration section of your web site an option to call the Packager class in the Agent to send your session data to where you do administration tasks. 

For more information on how to do this see Developer's Guide for ASP.NET - Submitting Sessions on Error.