Gibraltar Software has announced Beta 4 of their new application logging and reporting product as a public beta.
We have been working with them over the past several months as they prepare to release their product and I am quite excited to finally have the ability to discuss it publicly. There are just so many uses for the product that once you start using it you will want to embed it into everything you build.
What is it?
Gibraltar is an end to end solution for logging, managing and reporting on your application. What you log is entirely up to your application. The product includes the ability to add trace listeners, log4net, and custom metric recording through custom code.
Why would you want to use it?
There are a ton of different uses for the product, but I will just cover a few scenarios we have been testing.
Let’s say you have 100 features in your product, but you don’t know which of those features your customers actually use most of the time. Add a metric to the logging and you can track the usage of these features and then periodically collect that information, or allow users to submit it to you. Think of it as a feature similar to the Customer Experience and Improvement program that Microsoft employs in many of their products. This is very valuable information to a small company that needs to know what features are most popular in order to set priorities for updates and enhancements as well.
We are looking at integrating Gibraltar into Data Builder as a start. We have wanted a way to get a customer experience program in place, and I think Gibraltar is a great tool for the job. Want to only track crashes in your application runtime? You can easily trap the information to Gibraltar, and have your users submit their information when they have a problem.
A few months ago I was testing a new caching strategy for the 4.x engine page manager and wanted an easy way to collect the stats for the cache over long term runs of the engine with real world applications. I added a custom metric for the cache manager and all of the internal states I wanted to track. After that it was simple to run the application through all my tests and collect all their results into the Gibraltar local cache.
Click to see larger image - Summary of my VistaDB Extent Test
Reporting Galore
That is where the Gibraltar Analyst really shines as a product. You can generate so many different reports and drill downs that your head will spin. I know I had way too much fun playing with the data once I had collected it!
Click to view larger - Report showing my CPU and memory during run
Just about anything you could possible want to view is available once you have the data collected. The reports are very easy to generate.
Click to view larger - This is the custom metric I built for Data Engine Cache
Deployment to your users
Deployment of the collection runtime (Gibraltar Agent) is royalty free. You can then use the information from your users in your local Gibraltar Analyst to see what is going on, develop reports, etc. The product is licensed per user running the Analyst.
Take the tour
Spread the Word
If you know someone who might be interested in Gibraltar, send them the information. This is a great chance to get the beta for free and get in early on a great product.
Free Trial Beta Download
Go and get the Beta 4 (it is a free download) and play with the samples. I can tell you that the product has been very stable in my testing, and the support responses to my questions have been prompt and complete.
I think Gibraltar definitely have a great product and wish them all the best.
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