Getting Started - Concepts - Accessing Session Data

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Viewing Data over the Web

The Loupe Server provides a web UI which provides a wealth of information about each session. It analyzes each session, extracting information about the characteristics of the session, errors and warnings, and application users. This information is aggregated together to provide a unified view of the usage and runtime behavior of your application. This frequently lets you skip having to find a specific session (although that's easy to do) and instead jump strait to meeting your goal.

Customer Support

When helping solve a customer support issue you can quickly go from the computer or user experiencing the issue to the set of error(s) they've encountered. You can then easily track these problems until they're resolved and relate them to the specific application versions they occur in. Since Loupe relates each unique error to the application & versions it's happened in you can then determine if it's a new problem to be fixed or simply an issue of having the customer upgrade to a newer version.

Manage Software Quality

Each application that sends data to Loupe gets its own quality dashboard that tracks the number of problems and their status by application version. With knowledge of your release cycle, Loupe displays how your quality has been trending - how many new problems have been introduced in recent releases, how many have been fixed, and what would happen if you shipped your latest beta.

Track Application Usage

User, Computer, and Session trends by operating system, version, and other characteristics can be dissected. View charts to understand trends graphically and drill down to the specific computers, users, or sessions. This makes it easy to know who would be impacted by a decision to change application requirements or stop supporting older versions of your application.

Loupe provides dedicated views for application version adoption so you can see how quickly users are moving up to newer versions from older ones and who the holdouts are.

Viewing Sessions Locally on Windows

Loupe Desktop is the native Windows client that provides a developer-oriented deep dive capability for session data. It provides a unique session log viewer and metric analyzer to show the whole picture of what's going on in a single session.

Remotely-Recorded Sessions

To access data collected on another computer you will need to send session files to a Loupe Server which is a highly optimized aggregation point for Loupe data. All of the session data maintained on the server is available in the Repository Viewer. For more information see Loupe Desktop - Repositories.

As an alternative to the Loupe Server you can manually transport session data files yourself with the help of the Packager utility and your own coded infrastructure.

Locally-Recorded Sessions

During development or when supporting an individual computer you often just need to view data collected on the local computer.

As soon as a file is accessible it can be opened. Provided they are stored in the default directory locations they are displayed underneath their product name under Local Sessions. You can find the session in the list, double-click it and see all of the available detail using the Session Viewer. For more information see Loupe Desktop - Local Sessions.

Displaying Running Sessions

If the session is still running you can view the latest log information using the Live Sessions feature in Loupe Desktop or Loupe Viewer. This shows just the log information (not performance counters or other metrics). To view the full detail of the session file just click Save on the live view which will cause it to end the current session file and start a new one immediately. Then you can open the session file using Loupe Desktop.

When are Session Files Accessible

For performance and safety reasons while the Agent is writing to a data file it holds an exclusive lock on the file. This ensures that there's no way for file readers to interfere with the log writing process which could in turn affect the application being monitored. A consequence of this abundance of safety approach is that for data to be accessible the file has to be closed.

Session data files are automatically closed when:

They reach their maximum age: This can be adjusted but defaults to 1440 minutes (one day). This means by default even for a long-running process like a windows service a new file will be started every day.
They reach their maximum size: This can be adjusted but defaults to 10MB. When a log file as written exceeds that size it will be closed and a new file started.
The application domain exits. This completes the session and once the application domain exits the file lock is released.

Additionally, you can end the current file whenever you want by calling Log.EndFile. The next attempt to record information by the Agent will cause a new file to be opened.

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