Compatibility

• Agent: Due to file format changes, if you use the Agent in this release then you must upgrade the Server and Loupe Desktop as well. 
• Server: Fully backwards compatible with older Agents and Loupe Desktops.
• Loupe Desktop: Due to protocol changes, this Loupe Desktop is not compatible with older Server releases.  It is Fully backwards compatible with older Agents.

Side by Side Compatibility

You can mix older and newer agents on the same computer, however they will be unaware of each other and will not coordinate when sending to hub, packaging, or auto send consent.  When upgrading any unsent sessions recorded by a 2.x agent will not be transferred by the newer agent.

New Features In This Release

Network Live View

You can now view log data in real time over a network connection between Agent & Loupe Desktop.  This requires all three components be up to date: Agent, Server, and Loupe Desktop.  Since it requires an updated Server to work this isn't available with the Loupe Service at this time.

For more information, see Reference - Live Sessions.

Categorize Sessions by Environment and Promotion Level

You can now pass an environment name (e.g. your hosting company, a facility name, or some other scheme you use for naming your internal computing environments) or a promotion level (e.g. internal, certification, production) if either of those fit for you.  Both fields can be used at the same time, or you can leave them blank if they don't apply to your situation.

For more information, see Reference - Session Categorization.

Session File Compression

The compression approach used for session files has been dramatically improved with the average file approximately one third the size of the same data in a Loupe 2.0 data file.

Agent Scalability

A number of updates have been done to improve the scalability of Agent with larger and longer sessions.  This includes:

• Reduced memory during recording: The memory used while recording session data into large files has been significantly reduced.
• Reduced memory during packaging: The way session data files are transferred from agents through to the Loupe Desktop has been changed to prevent merging file fragments in the Agent and deferring it to when it is loaded.  This dramatically reduces the memory and processor impact of packaging.
• Efficient hub network transfer for long-running sessions: Individual file fragments aren't resent to the hub when there are updates.  Long running processes (like windows services) can keep sending updates efficiently and if you elect to send data to the server every time there is an error the amount of data sent is only the unsent information.

Loupe Desktop Scalability

A number of updates have been done to improve the ability to use Loupe Desktop with larger sessions and more sessions.  This includes:

• Instant Refresh: The core of Loupe Desktop has been rewritten to provide dynamic updates as data is changing instead of using explicit refresh.
• 64-Bit support:  If you're running a 64-bit operating system Loupe Desktop will now run in 64-bit to let you take advantage of all the RAM you can muster.
• Analysis safety limit:  Loupe Desktop won't attempt to perform background analysis on sessions that might require more memory than is available.

Server Synchronization Options

You can now configure if you want Loupe Desktop to automatically download all session data (previously the only option), just download session summaries or not download anything until prompted.  When set to just download session summaries the session detail will be automatically retrieved if you open a session to view it.  This can tremendously reduce the disk space and time required to get in sync with the hub.  This configuration option is under the new Server menu.

Download Sessions on Demand

Instead of having to wait for sessions to download in order you can pick individual session(s) to download manually.  Opening a session will download it immediately, and you can right-click in the sessions grid and select Download to retrieve specific sessions in the background. 

Session Analysis

You can perform a range of analysis on the session summary information using the new Analyze Sessions view.  For example, you can find the number of sessions by version for each application for each month in the past year.  Alternately, you can look at the change in OS usage over time or any of another of other unique analysis.  For more information, see Loupe Desktop - Analyze Sessions.

Metric Graphing

Session metric graphing has been rewritten to offer similar capabilities to metric charting.  You can now:

• Customize metric grouping and display: You can change the default grouping of metrics by unit to your own grouping.  Additional graph types such as area, stacked area, and full stacked area are supported to facilitate viewing how sets of metrics contribute together to a total in absolute and percentage terms.
• Edit graphed metrics: Once you've added a metric to the graph you can edit its configuration.
• Easy export to PNG: In addition to a full featured printing feature for graphs you can do a one-button export to PNG to quickly get an image of a graph.

Server Support for SQL Server

You can now use SQL Server as the hub index database instead of the embedded database that is used by default.  This can be configured in the Loupe Server Administration tool.  At this time, there is no data migration from the embedded database to SQL Server so reconfiguring to use SQL Server will effectively reset the entire repository.  For more information on how to set up your Server to use SQL Server, contact Gibraltar Software Support.

Support for PostSharp 2.1

The PostSharp integration for Loupe has been upgraded to work with PostSharp 2.1 as well as 2.0.  To use the aspects provided with this release you will need to install PostSharp 2.1, which is included in the SDK folders.

Support for MONO

The Agent in this release has been verified to work under some versions of MONO (2.4.2 and later) on Linux.  It may work for other versions of MONO and on other operating systems.  The final release of 3.0 is expected to work with MONO 2.4.2 and later under Linux and MacOS.

Support for Computers with only .NET 4.0 installed

The Loupe agent has always worked with the .NET 4.0 runtime due to the built-in support for hosting .NET 2.0 assemblies in .NET 4.0.  However, the Loupe Packager is a different issue since it creates its own process.  Accordingly, if the Packager was used on a computer with just .NET 4.0 installed it would fail to start.  As of Loupe 3.0, two versions of Packager are provided - one targeting .NET 2.0 for use with .NET 2.0 through 3.5 and another targeting .NET 4.0.  It is recommended that for applications that target .NET 4.0 they should distribute Gibraltar.Package.NET40.exe to be sure it works on all computers that could support the application.

Defects Fixed In This Release

This is the list of issues fixed since the last release version (2.5.2.815)

Agent

• Fixed: The Agent keeps a copy of the original exception well after it's queued for logging.
• Fixed: Packager utility will not crash when presented with bad input, it writes a message to the console instead.
• Fixed: Loupe Agent for PostSharp doesn't set a default event metric value.
• Fixed: Loupe Agent for PostSharp is not thread safe when calculating timing for methods that may be invoked concurrently.
• Fixed: Loupe Agent for PostSharp GFeature treats EnableSourceLookup exactly backwards when set. 
• Fixed: Can hang process when synchronously packaging from the UI thread.

Loupe Desktop

• Fixed: AddIns can't access metric samples because they don't implement the correct interfaces.
• Fixed: Add Loupe Wizard doesn't add newer configuration sections and removes them if present.
• Fixed: Products or Applications with certain invalid characters will cause the repository view to fail to display any sessions.
• Fixed: Loupe Desktop doesn't update the tree view to reflect changes in the list of products, applications, and versions.
• Fixed: Closing Loupe Desktop while it's downloading large session files from Server causes drag-and-drop error.

Server

• Fixed: Updated session data isn't available if the session was already read by a Loupe Desktop due to a problem with the file cache.
• Fixed: If a request times out while waiting on an internal lock it may cause all subsequent requests to timeout.
• Fixed: SQL Server access is serialized to the database when it doesn't need to be.
• Fixed: Pruning doesn't work in some cases where more than 2GB of data is gathered per day.

Gemini Integration

• Fixed: Integration now works with Gemini v4.x.