Loupe 4.7 Released

We’ve published Loupe 4.7 for download and to Loupe Cloud-Hosted with a roll up of features and fixes that we wanted to get out before Loupe 5. You can download the latest version from here for Loupe Self-Hosted customers. As always, if you want to update your Loupe Desktop we recommend downloading it from within the Loupe Web UI.

Loupe Utilization Monitoring

We’ve made it a lot easier to understand how much activity your Loupe repository is getting and what applications are driving it. Just go to the Utilization option in the Administration area and you’ll see both how many sessions and how much total data you are receiving by day, week, or month.

First, you can see how much of your repository limit is in use. Since limits are set by age and total volume you may not be using all your volume (because data is aging out first). The display also shows how far back you have data - so you can see if you are being capped how much time that represents.

Then, you can see how much data and how many sessions you’ve received for the past block of days, weeks, or months. Solid bars reflect time periods where you have session data files.

Finally, click on any time period to see a breakdown of the volume by product and application. This is designed to help you determine what applications are responsible for both surges in volume and your total volume sent to the system.

By the way - these metrics are from the internal Loupe repository we use where all of our CEIP data goes as well as what we monitor from our production instances. Just another way we use Loupe with Loupe!

GDPR Enhancements

We’re sure that like us you’ve had to put some time into GDPR preparedness. At the same time we were changing how our web sites work with your protected data and getting our policies updated we also updated Loupe Cloud-Hosted to make it easy for you to comply with GDPR with your customers.

If you are using Loupe to monitor your own public-facing web applications and track protected information (such as user email addresses, real names, and IP Addresses) you both need to be able to delete the data for these users on request (the “Right to be forgotten”) and you may need a GDPR Data Processing Addendum with us to cover the routine processing we’ll do to help you operate your site.

You can now remove an application user in Loupe and it will not only delete that user from Loupe but also unlink them with any issues they had and if they were the sole user on a session anonymize the session summary that is preserved. The original session files are not modified, however those age out based on the operational policy that you configure for Loupe. Just search for the user by any of their identifying characteristics and then select Delete from the Action menu.

New Full Text Search

Loupe Cloud-Hosted and Loupe Server Enterprise can now use ElasticSearch for full text searching instead of the built-in Lucene.NET engine. This change was made because Lucene.NET was only ever intended for use on a local file system and we’ve had increasing reliability problems with it in SaaS and enterprise deployments.

That said, we know many enterprise customers are not keen to deploy additional third-party servers so Lucene.NET remains the default and will still be used by default. Loupe Cloud-Hosted customers have already been converted over to Elasticsearch.

This option isn’t available for Loupe Server Standard Edition as that only supports local file systems and in that configuration Lucene.NET is actually faster than ElasticSearch so there’s no need for it at this point.

More High DPI Changes

We’ve continued to broaden our testing of High DPI devices both for the web UI and Loupe Desktop with a slate of small fixes incorporated into Loupe 4.7. Given the wide range of resolutions and DPI for devices it’s possible we’ve missed something - so reach out to support if somethings looks off to you so we can narrow the circumstances down and get it resolved for you. Were planning a more complete High DPI review of Loupe Desktop as part of Loupe 5; in essence up to this point we wanted to be sure Desktop worked, now we’re going for it looks right.

What’s Next

Why, Loupe 5 of course! Look for announcements later this month about what’ll be in Loupe 5 and the road we’re taking to get there. Good stuff ahead!