What problems does Loupe Server solve?

Loupe Server is designed to address a couple key scenarios:

1. Collecting data from many application instances even past firewalls such as commercial software products.
2. Customer Experience Improvement Programs (CEIP) for proactively gathering feedback on application performance in the field through continuous data collection and analysis.

How does Loupe Server complement Loupe Agent and Loupe Desktop?

Loupe Server sits between Loupe Agent and Loupe Desktop making it easier to get data from users to the development team. It’s a web service providing two interfaces: one for Agents to submit logs, the other allowing logs to stream down into Loupe Desktops. With Loupe Server you can collect, manage and analyze thousands of logs and provide every member of your development team with a consistent, near real-time view of all that data as well as simple, powerful tools to analyze the data and gain new insights into the areas of your applications most needing improvement.

Is Server required to use Loupe?

No, Server is optional. The existing email and file transfer mechanisms in Agent will continue to be supported as a core, essential capability of Loupe. However, Loupe Server provides the best user experience because both Loupe Desktop and Agent have been enhanced to support secure, reliable, background data transfers with Server.  This means the applications can be configured to silently stream sessions in the background and the development team sees new data automatically appear like new mail popping into their inbox.

How does Server help development teams?

Loupe Server provides a centralized store for data from Loupe Agents.  Server also analyzes data to manage errors and alerts - see User's Guide - Resolve - Introduction and User's Guide - Monitor - Introduction.

What's required to host my own Server?

The full set of requirements for hosting your own Loupe Server can be found at System Requirements.  If you don't want to host it yourself, you can subscribe to the Loupe Server - Cloud-Hosted.

What is a Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) and how does Loupe Server help?

Microsoft coined the term Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) and describe it like this:

CEIP collects information about how our customers use Microsoft programs and about some of the problems they encounter. Microsoft uses this information to improve the products and features customers use most often and to help solve problems. Participation in the program is voluntary, and the end results are software improvements to better meet the needs of our customers.

The three components of Loupe correspond directly with the three key challenges for development teams wishing to create their own CEIP:

• Agent efficiently collects data about how customers use programs and records details on problems they encounter.
• Server provides reliable, secure transmission of log data from end-users to each member of the development team. Data is highly compressed and the transfer protocol is firewall-friendly and reliable even when network connectivity is limited and intermittent.  It also indexes all that data and provides powerful visualization tools that help team members identify broad patterns spanning many logs as well as the ability to drill into each log to point the root cause of a single issue.
• Desktop lets you drill down to the lowest level of detail in a log to view performance information, and the step-by-step details of any log file recorded by Loupe Agent.

Does automatic transmission of logging data raise any privacy concerns?

Yes, dealing responsibly with information privacy is extremely important. At the same time, the considerations vary widely between different applications so we think that it’s important for Loupe to provide the flexibility to fit within a broad range of usage scenarios. For example, having a dialog for CEIP opt-in is a recommended best practice for a commercial software product but for an in-house corporate application that is only used by employees their employment agreement or computer login screen may already require informed consent to certain information being monitored.

With this in mind, you should consider providing a method for the user to opt into your program.  If you are developing a windows (WinForms or WPF) application you should seriously consider using the built in auto send consent feature of the Agent.  For more information see Getting Started - User Opt In.