New Features in This Release

Issue Management Dashboard

A new Issue Management Dashboard has been created to show development teams, test managers, and production support engineers the issues and events for review that matter most.  Leveraging Loupe information about versions and releases, it shows how the current version compares to previous versions and what would happen if you published the most recent build.  Even in environments where there are a large number of events to review this new dashboard will highlight the most important items to check so you can maximize the time you have.

You can access the new dashboard by clicking on Issues in the header once you've selected an application or by clicking on the Application Badge in the All Apps dashboard.

For more information, see User's Guide - Resolve - Managing Events and Issues.

Very Large Session Display

Loupe Desktop can now open a session regardless of how large it is without requiring enough local system memory to load the entire session at once.  It will instead display a dialog allowing you to identify the time frame of the session you want to access by selecting it from a histogram display showing logging and error activity.  This can dramatically improve the time it takes to load and display a large session (even when there is sufficient memory available).

The time to download a large session has been improved by 50% on average and reloading a session with many fragments has been improved by up to 95% by optimizing repository access.  Downloading a large session from the server may still be slow the first time the session is downloaded.

Performance and Scalability Improvements

To support Enterprise edition and new customers with larger installations Loupe Server was comprehensively reviewed to improve performance on commodity hardware.  Most of these improvements consisted of indexing and database locking enhancements and apply to all editions of Loupe Server.  These improvements were verified with installations ranging from a single virtual machine handling 250GB of data in 10,000 sessions per day up to clustered repositories with 3TB and 250,000 sessions per day.

Additional tuning parameters were added to Loupe Server to allow advanced optimization of background processing in cases where sessions typically require more or less processing than the norm.

Other Web UI Enhancements

• Jump between Applications within the same Product by selecting the application in the web site header area.
• The Application Event Review page now offers three built in views - Most Recent, Most Frequent, and Most Widespread - and allows you to dynamically sort by any displayed column to optimize your review process.
• The Application badges on the All Applications Dashboard link through to the Issue Management Dashboard based on user feedback of what they want when drilling into an application.
• The User and Version columns on Issue grids have been relabeled to Last User and Highest Version to more clearly indicate how they are determined.
• Statistics charts with versions have been modified to show versions in order regardless of value to ensure newer versions progress to the right.
  

Enterprise Edition

To support larger installations where users may want to:

• Separate transport, web UI, and background processing tasks to different computers.
• Have multiple servers for redundancy and scale-out system performance.
• Have multiple repositories to separate teams on a common Loupe Server installation.
• Support groups of network storage volumes to store a virtually unlimited amount of session data.

All of these capabilities are provided in Loupe Server Enterprise edition.  This is the same configuration of Loupe Server which is used for the multitenant Loupe Service, proven over the past three years to provide high performance, scalable infrastructure for your company.

Compatibility

Loupe 3.6.0 is backwards compatible with 3.0 and has the same constraints as 3.0 when working with older versions:

• Agent: Compatible with Server & Desktop versions 3.0 and later.
• Server: Fully backwards compatible with older Agents and Loupe Desktops, any version.
• Desktop: Compatible with Server versions 3.0 and later.  Compatible with any version of Agent.

Agent 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.

Review Loupe 3.5 Notes

Since this is an update release you should read Getting Started - What's New - Version 3.5 for a more complete picture of the new capabilities since version 3.0.

Defects Fixed In This Release

Agent

• Fixed: Agent fails to purge files that are archived, meaning server configurations that auto send sessions but don't auto purge them will accumulate session files indefinitely.
• Fixed: Application directory configurations is unnecessarily strict, Reports Windows 8.1 is an unknown version.
• Fixed: Duplicate file names in the local logging directory tree cause prune for space to fail.
• Fixed: Entity Framework Agent doesn't record parameters or row counts on event metric samples.

Desktop

• Fixed: Graphing an Event Metric numerical value sums instead of averaging multiple samples in the same interval.
• Fixed: Log Search AddIn fails to create database when configured.
• Fixed: Right-click context menus throw exception in the Log Search grids.
• Fixed: Displaying a log message with an invalid source code path displays an error message.

Server

• Fixed: Creating new virtual users requires a password be specified even though it doesn't apply to virtual users.
• Fixed: Issue Resolution Dialog only displays the last 200 versions in the dropdown list.
• Fixed: Issue Resolution Dialog displays two version editors when a new version is added from the dialog.
• Fixed: Adding a new application version from the Issue Resolution Dialog doesn't enable the OK button until you tab out of the last field.
• Fixed: Issues can be assigned to invalid users such as system and inactive users.
• Fixed: Footer can cover action buttons on the Issue Management Rules list page.
• Fixed: Issue Management Rules reorder buttons may not work depending on how data was previously edited.
• Fixed: Issue Management Rules allow you to specify fields that don't apply to this type of rule.
• Fixed: Issue Management Rules don't allow you to specify that log message severity should be ignored by the rule.
• Fixed: Issue Management Rules ignore any Release Type filter that is specified.
• Fixed: Applying Issue Management Rules after changes fails due to database error.
• Fixed: Applying Issue Management Rules may not result in the correct behavior on version boundaries when a version constraint is specified by the rule.
• Fixed: Application Event Notification Rules allow you to specify fields that don't apply to this type of rule.
• Fixed: Application Version Editor allows an invalid version to be entered as the display version, causing problems for Loupe Desktop.
• Fixed: Statistics grids on Application Events fail to sort by some columns and break sorting in all grids when sorting is attempted.
• Fixed: Usage charts don't show the final month when grouped by month.
• Fixed: Pruning old files from the repository can be slow to very slow depending on disk latency.
• Fixed: Maintaining application metrics can use a significant amount of database time and CPU for repositories with a large number of sessions.
• Fixed: All possible application filter options are loaded when the site is first accessed, causing slow initial page load depending on the number of sessions in the repository, possibly even causing the page to time out.
• Fixed: All Applications dashboard generates a query for every application known to the system when displaying, causing poor scalability.
• Fixed: On short screens the footer covers content and doesn't stay at the bottom of the screen as the content is scrolled.
• Fixed: Loss of connection to the SQL Server causes background session analysis thread to exit, requiring the service be restarted.
• Fixed: Server can record unbounded data for log events causing the web UI to be unresponsive.