The table below provides a quick overview of the options available to you to integrate Loupe with your application to collect and analyze application usage information.
Note that you don’t need to do all these steps. You can have Loupe integrated and providing value within 5 minutes. However, we have included some additional capabilities that can give your applications polish and make them easier to support. Use what provides value, leave the rest.
| Step | Description | Links |
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Getting Started |
To begin, you may find it helpful to read some of the other material in the getting started section. Or not. Feel free to jump right in if you prefer. |
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Attach Loupe |
Attaching Loupe to your application requires only a few lines of code or XML. If you use the XML configuration approach, you don’t even need to recompile! |
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Choose a Log Framework |
To get the most out of Loupe, you will want to capture log messages as your application executes. Loupe provides a built-in high performance framework, but it works with virtually log framework. Pick and approach and integrate it. If you’re already using the .NET Trace classes, you can stick with that as well. If you want to add logging quickly to your application and aren't sure where to start, check out the Loupe Agent for PostSharp. You can add low level trace and exception monitoring to your application in minutes, along with high level feature monitoring and metrics. Even if you're experienced with adding logging, it's worth checking out at Third Party Integration - Using PostSharp with Loupe. |
Developer's Guide - Logging - Using with Trace Developer's Guide - Logging - Directly to Loupe Third Party Integration - Using Log4Net with Loupe |
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Effective Logging |
To gain even more value from Loupe, you may wish to add some additional log messages to give a more complete picture of what is happening inside your application |
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Exception Handling |
By default, the Loupe Agent silently logs all unhandled exceptions. However, you may wish to have more control so you can alert the user to the error or offer to transmit your logs. |
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Integrating Server |
A nice bit of polish to include in your desktop applications is providing a simple mechanism for customers to submit session files. The Loupe API makes this very easy to do. You should also check out the Loupe Server - the simplest way to get information sent from your application anywhere in the world to the folks that need to look at the data. |
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Custom Metrics |
Loupe makes it very easy to capture and analyze application-specific metrics such as execution times for critical functions or feature usage statistics. With custom metrics you can easily graph or chart virtually any numeric values of relevance to you. |