To help you categorize sessions from all of the various places they may come from Loupe automatically records information such as user and computer name.  However, it's often useful to have a few independent capabilities:

• Environment: An arbitrary name you assign to a computing environment, such as the name of your hosting company, facility, or other meaningful name for where the computer is located.
• Promotion Level: An arbitrary name you assign for the session's promotion level such as development, certification, and production.

You can use these values independently.  For example, you may have both production and certification systems located in a data center.  In that scenario you likely would want to set the Environment to be the name of the data center and the promotion level to either Production or Certification to separate the two scenarios.

How are new entries created?

If you configure an environment or promotion level in a session (either in a configuration file or programmatically) it is carried with the session to the Server or Loupe Desktop.  If there is no existing item with the same name a new entry is created.

Why both Environment and Promotion Level?

Internally, Loupe treats these as just separate categorizations however when talking with customers we found that there were two distinct cases that people discussed often:

1. Computers often live in a computing environment, and actions are often tied to the environment.  For example, you may always care about errors in your data center.
2. Some organizations use the same computers for different logical environments and differentiate by the grade of the session (such as test, certification, and production)

Since these cases can overlap both are available in the Agent.