Prerequisites
Before installing Gibraltar, you need to have .NET 2.0 SP1 or later installed.
If .NET 2.0 is installed without SP1 or SP2 installation will proceed but the application
will fail to start.
Installation Notes
Compatibility Change
The default value for the maximum size of a log file has been changed from
5MB to 0 indicating the agent should let files grow as large as necessary up to
the maximum local disk usage (which defaults to 50MB). This is based on customer
experience which indicates that the primary reason to start a new session data file
with Gibraltar is in long running sessions which is handled separately.
For more information see
Developer's Reference - Session File Configuration.
Because of the API changes, the Assembly Version for the Gibraltar Agent and related
assemblies is now 2.1.0.0. If you have references that are set to a specific
version they will need to be updated to use this new assembly and then recompiled.
Any strong named assembly that references the Gibraltar Agent or related assemblies
will also have to be recompiled.
Uninstall any previous version of Gibraltar before installing a new version.
On computers with Visual Studio installed the installation will pause for a while
at 99% while it updates the help content. Please do not interrupt this process
which, depending on the speed of your computer and how many other products have
integrated with Visual Studio Help, may take from one to ten minutes.
New Features in This Release
Gibraltar Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP)
The first two times you start the Gibraltar Analyst you'll have the opportunity to opt in
to our CEIP. We encourage you to select Yes so your experience using Analyst
will be available to our development team. Many of the subtle polish and performance
improvements in Gibraltar 2.1 came directly from the CEIP program introduced during
the beta of 2.1.
Participation is completely optional and you will not be contacted directly because
of your participation in the CEIP.
Gibraltar Hub
The Gibraltar Hub provides a safe, secure method of automatically gathering data
from Agents anywhere in the world and sending that data to multiple Analysts. This
capability complements sending data via email or files and helps with customer support
and Customer Experience Improvement Programs (CEIP).
To try out the Hub, go to
Support - My Profile and Licenses to get your Hub trial account. Trial accounts
are free during this preview program.
Improved Scalability
Based on feedback and sample data from customers we've identified and resolved some
situations where we could improve the size or complexity of the data managed by
Gibraltar. This includes:
- Splitting Large Packages for Email: You can now
specify a size limit to match your email server's attachment size limit and
the packager will break data being sent into multiple emails if necessary to fit
within that limit automatically.
- Packages are up to 40% Smaller: We've updated to the latest compression library
available for the package data format which results in an average of 30% file size
reduction while maintaining backwards compatibility.
- Logs with Large Captions Open and display faster: In some cases, logs that
had very long captions (instead of splitting data between caption and description
could cause slow display and scrolling through logs.
- Operating on large sets of sessions is much faster: Deleting sets of sessions,
marking them read, or marking them as not read is significantly faster. Grids also
support Ctrl-A for select all.
- Only one copy of Analyst per Session: Instead of starting a new copy of Analyst
each time a package is opened they will open into a single running copy of Analyst.
Log Viewing Enhancements
- Independent Log Message Display: You can open an individual log message into
its own window, making it easy to view very large messages even if they are preformatted.
- Log Message Detail Copy as Xml: A dedicated command has been added to the
log message detail viewer to copy the entire value as xml to the clipboard to make
it easier to pull into other tools.
- Log Message Columns and Tabs automatically hidden when not necessary: When
all the values in a column are the same or a certain feature (like log message details)
is never used in an entire log that area is hidden.
- Smarter Column Resize: A new resize algorithm attempts to give the most space
to the Caption field when useful without letting it get too wide to be handy.
- Stack Trace Copy: A dedicated command has been added to the Exception viewer
to copy out the stack trace. This makes it easy to work with code obfuscation tools
and other external stack analyzers.
Third Party Integration
We've incorporated the necessary code to integrate Gibraltar with several third
party products right in the box along with documentation for how to use. Complete
source code is also available for the different integration points so you can use
our assemblies or roll your own extending the work we've done. At present
this includes:
- Log4Net: This is the same as previously distributed.
- NLog: New in this release.
- PostSharp: An Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) tool.
We have developed the Gibraltar Agent for PostSharp
which includes a set of Aspects that can create
log messages and metrics on the fly with no code. Even if you're an
old hand at creating log messages it's amazing what you can do, quickly and cleanly
with the Gibraltar Agent for PostSharp.
Other Agent Features
- Crashed Sessions are now converted from Running to Crashed immediately instead of
requiring at least 75 second delay between the crash and check for crashed.
- When the current environment can't support SendSessionsOnExit specific troubleshooting
guidance is now recorded into the log instead of a general message.
- Session pruning is more aggressive on startup when heavy logging causes a session
file to roll over during the first few minutes of a session.
- The Agent will upgrade the local index database used only for collecting session
information even if packaging processes are never run, ensuring the latest code
for repository maintenance is available.
- Reduced memory footprint in non-UI processes by automatically disabling all UI-related
features.
Other Analyst Features
- Charts are much less likely to have overlapping labels when displaying a large number
of points or displaying in a small area.
- Improved startup performance in several scenarios.
Defects Fixed In This Release
This is the list of issues fixed since the last release version (2.0.478)
Agent
- Fixed: Agent ignores Max File Age from App.Config file
- Fixed: Packager class hangs if an attempt is made to send email with incomplete
email server information available.
- Fixed: SendSessionsOnExit fails to pass authentication information for the
email server to the packager
- Fixed: Agent incorrectly categorizes a windows service as a Console or WinForms
application.
- Fixed: SendSessionsOnExit would throw a null reference exception if logging
was never started and an attempt was made to set SendSessionsOnExit to true.
- Fixed: Assembly Info was not preserved when multiple session fragments had
to be merged together, causing it to not display in the Assemblies grid in the Analyst.
- Fixed: OS Edition details are wrong for some server versions (like Server
2008).
- Fixed: Disabling local storage limit may cause age pruning to fail.
Analyst
- Fixed: Repository Viewer doesn't support Unicode data.
- Fixed: Analyst start page doesn't refresh after new data is imported
- Fixed: Selecting Open Full Screen for a session on the start page doesn't
do anything
- Fixed: Merging a package into a package fails
- Fixed: Two folders in the User repository can't have the same name even if
they have different parent folders.
- Fixed: Importing a package into a folder doesn't add the sessions to the folder,
even though they are added to the repository.
- Fixed: Analyst doesn't display wait cursor or progress when marking sessions
read.
- Fixed: Opening a minimized Gibraltar Session doesn't restore the window.
- Fixed: Session command line is often truncated and hard to see for longer
application names.
- Fixed: Configuration Wizard can't add files to a web site that's not been
compiled.
- Fixed: Configuration Wizard can't remove agent files that are marked read-only.
- Fixed: Metric Captions in the Session Viewer would switch to fully qualified
names if session data was refreshed.
- Fixed: Repository Summary View of Sessions by OS duplicates session rows,
inflating counts.
- Fixed: Session Viewer Metric Chart fails to add secondary Count of Events
trend when multiple numeric values are present in the metric and none selected first.
- Fixed: If Analyst exited in the middle of importing a session the session
would be stranded and produce view errors until removed.
- Fixed: Analyst has Formatting Problems at 120dpi. Previously, several
screens only worked correctly at the default setting of 96 dpi. Now 120dpi
and 144dpi are supported, although on smaller screens the amount of data displayed
may be significantly reduced (by design due to scale change)