We've enabled per-screen display scaling in Loupe Desktop which means higher DPI screens (like 4K screens or the Surface Pro) will see content rendered using the screen's native DPI instead of the historical 96 DPI. For this initial version with High DPI support the goal has been that all views work without content being cutoff or inaccessible. Several graphical elements (e.g. icons on toolbars or in grids) haven't been updated with high resolution equivalents; this will be done in a future update.
The time zone selection options for the Repository Viewer have been extended into the Session Viewer, making it easy to shift the time zone of log message display. Instead of always seeing session data relative to the time zone the session was recorded in it now can be displayed in any time zone. This makes it easy to align session data from multiple time zones for accurate comparison or shifting data recorded in UTC to the local time zone.
A new time range selector replaces the previous paging control for large session files and lets you select any wide or narrow time range in the loaded data for message viewing.
It's possible to filter the log for all entries that match a text string instead of just searching for those values. Search remains in the toolbar (and is improved to auto-search) and the filter can be applied independently form the Filter panel.
The message severity filter is now a series of buttons to indicate the minimum severity (like how Live Sessions works) instead of a combo box for selecting the level.
New direct filtering to a specific user makes it easy to narrow down the log data to just that for a single user or a single user plus the process identity. This is particularly useful for understanding web application usage. User filtering only displays for sessions with more than one user.
Direct thread filtering supports selecting any subset of threads to show or hide, making it easy to follow a single activity or a small set of activities in the log.
A new dedicated performance view replaces the small graph at the top of the log viewer, providing more information by default in a larger display format. Select the Performance tab in the Session Viewer to see the new view.
When displaying sessions from a Loupe Server an Events view is added to the Session Viewer. This displays not just the events in that session (unique warnings and errors) but also shows the specific occurrences from the log data that is loaded. Each occurrence can then be drilled into showing the messages leading up to that occurrence. This emulates similar behavior available in the Loupe Web UI.
More view defaults are automatically remembered between executions of Loupe Desktop including the show/hide details area of Live View and Repository View.
Most of the UI elements in the Session Viewer were shifted to a new component library that provides a more Visual Studio-like appearance and behavior. These new controls also improve the performance of some operations in the Session Viewer. The various views in the Session Viewer now leverage a common tool bar to merge commands into, providing a more compact experience that is more like Visual Studio.
Commands registered by Loupe Extensions can now create hierarchal menus of arbitrary depth by using a period (.) in the command name to denote each level of hierarchy and a backslash (\) in the label.
The log viewer introduced in version 4.5 has been improved with a new approach to log scrolling that offers much better performance across supported browsers and eliminates display jitter in most scenarios when new data is being loaded. Users will notice more natural scroll bar usage when browsing through the log from either the beginning or the end.
Loupe Server now supports having separate front-end servers (that only server the content of the web site but perform no dynamic requests) and back-end servers. This supports two new modes for Loupe Server:
Loupe Cloud-Hosted now leverages both of these capabilities to offer separate Europe and US back ends and a common static front end DNS name with the files distributed around the world via a CDN.
Any administrator can invite other users to a Loupe Server from the dashboard page. This process is simpler than manually creating the user and lets the end user enter their own information, notably password, eliminating the need to communicate a password to them out of band.
In Loupe Enterprise when adding a user by user name that already exists the user's information on file (such as display name and email address) will be automatically brought forward into the new repository. It can still be overridden on each repository.
Based on usability testing the All Applications view uses a new icon for favoriting applications that is more visible and instead of displaying the list of favorite applications at the top of the screen collapsed it displays instruction text explicitly describing how to favorite and unfavorite applications.
For details on how to upgrade your on-premises Loupe Server installation see Loupe Server Administration - Upgrading to a New Version.
Loupe 4.x is generally backwards compatible with 3.0 with the following notes: