Loupe 4.0 - Find the Right Log and Open it Fast, all from Your Desktop

Loupe 4.0 provides much tighter integration between the Loupe Desktop log viewer and the central log repository managed by Loupe Server. Read on to learn how Loupe 4…

• Optimizes updates to the list of available logs
• Synchronizes your personal list of recently accessed logs across all your devices
• Synchronizes log deletes and “new” status across your team
• Displays error summaries for a log without downloading the whole log
• Downloads logs much faster — especially big logs!

Native Loupe Desktop - Server Integration

For years, our Desktop and Server have kept themselves at arms length; Data was copied down from the server to each desktop individually and only when it was running.  Any changes you made locally only applied to your copy.  If you elected to copy data and summaries it could consume disk space with abandon.  With just summaries you couldn’t copy data to your local repository easily.  The whole approach made a bit of sense early on when volumes were low and more users were just using Desktop but interviewing our user community showed that folks using Desktop with Server wanted it to act like you were directly manipulating the Server data.  It was time to drop our historical approach and start fresh to meet our customer’s expectations.

When connected with a Server running version 4.0 or later, instead of synchronizing down a copy of the session data that’s independent of the server it now runs directly against the server repository.  This new integration means the latest sessions are available quickly.  Additionally:

• Removing Sessions Deletes them Permanently from the Server:  It’s been a common source of confusion that removing a session in Loupe Desktop didn’t affect the session on the server or any other computer.  Now it deletes it permanently from the system, and for all users connected to the server.
• Common New Sessions View:  All users on the computer share the same list of new vs. opened sessions.
• Latest Session List: The set of most recent sessions opened by a user is stored on the server so they can see them on any computer they connect to.

Open Big Sessions Fast

A common complaint - and boy, do we hear it - is that if you want to open a large session it first has to download all of the content from the server before it asks you how much of that you want to load.  It could take 30 minutes (no joke!) to download hundreds of MB of data just so you could open the tail of the log.

With Loupe 4 that’s a thing of the past - it contacts the server to find out how much data is available then lets you pick the timeframe and asks you how much you want to download and open.  We’ve also made the download process work in parallel so it can stream multiple log files down at the same time.  The net result is that opening big files is much, must faster.

See Users, Errors and Warnings without Opening the Session

Many folks told us that they like to browse through the list of sessions and take a peek at the errors in each to decide which to open.  Historically that is a slow process - you have to double click each session, download all of the data, and then decide if the session was interesting.  Now you can just click on a session and get the log event data down from the server.  It’s easy to scan each session for interesting problems and view a lot about them without ever downloading the details.

If you’ve found an interesting error, just click the Open button to view it in the Web UI where you can find all the instances of similar problems, create an issue, and in general take advantage of the unique features of Loupe Server.

Open Logs from Web Browser

The tighter integration between Loupe Server and Desktop also goes in the other direction. Whenever you are looking at a session or a specific event in the Loupe Web UI, you have an option to view the complete log.  Clicking the button downloads the log to your computer and opens it in Loupe Desktop.