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
Uninstall any previous version of Gibraltar before installing a new version.
Defect Tracking Integration
Gibraltar Agent and Hub can integrate directly with some defect tracking
systems to automatically open, update, and reopen issues when qualifying errors
are found in sessions.
- Configure how sessions relate to your defect tracking
system: Map the product, application, versions from
Gibraltar to the categorization method you use to track issues.
- Separate support & development issues: Map
released versions to different areas than development versions to separate
production support from development.
Automatically Manage Issues - Better than Email Integration
Each error in a matching session is analyzed to see if it has already
been recorded in the defect tracking system. This integration
ensures:
- Errors with a new unique signature will open new issues.
- If an issue reoccurs in a new version after it has been closed it will
be reopened.
- Gibraltar sessions and issues will be related so you can easily see all
of the sessions in Gibraltar for a particular issue.
All of this is possible because Gibraltar queries the defect tracking system
while analyzing sessions to determine the right action to take.
View Issues and Related Sessions within Gibraltar
You can jump right to the list of issues in the defect tracking system and
see all of the related sessions from within Gibraltar.
- See all of the other errors in sessions related to the current issue to
recognize patterns of errors
- See the characteristics of sessions with an error, like operating
system, time zone, and software version.
- Drill down to the details of each occurrence in the session
- Open the issue in the defect tracking system directly from
Gibraltar.
Supported Defect Tracking Systems
In this release, two systems are supported:
- CounterSoft
Gemini: A web-based project management platform for
Scrum, Issue & Defect Tracking.
- FogBugz: A
web-based issue tracking, customer support, and project planning
system.
Additional systems will be added based on user requests - if we don't
support the system you need, please let us know. Because this integration
is done using the Gibraltar Add In API, new systems can be added outside
of a release.
Email Notifications
You can elect to receive email notifications when sessions arrive at the
Hub. These are configured directly in Analyst but run on the Hub so you
can be alerted whether you're at your computer or not.
For more information, see User's Guide - Notifications.
Gibraltar Add Ins
The Analyst and Hub support a new AddIn
API that lets you extend the user interface with a range of capabilities
including:
- Custom Session Analysis: Access all of the data
of each session as it arrives, allowing it to be exported into an external
system, indexed, or otherwise interpreted.
- User Interface Views: You can create custom
visualizations of session summaries and full session data that integrate
directly into the Gibraltar Analyst user experience.
- Custom Commands: Additional commands can be
added to the Analyst, sessions, and log messages to perform unique
actions.
To make it easier to develop powerful extensions to Gibraltar the AddIn API
includes:
- Distributed configuration management: It's easy
to have different configuration sections for Hub-specific, user-specific,
machine-specific and shared team options. You can provide a
configuration user interface that can edit all of the configuration from
Analyst and copy the configuration back to the Hub without requiring any IT
involvement.
- Secure credentials: You can easily store
multiple sets of credentials that can be user-specific, machine-specific,
and hub-specific. These are encrypted using the Microsoft CAPI RSA
Hybrid key cryptography.
Gibraltar Live Viewer Enhancements
Shows More Information
The Live Viewer has been updated to show all of the information related to a
log message including full exception details, details xml, and related source
code. The refresh performance has also been improved to be much more
responsive with less overhead.
Display the Viewer through the Log API
You can now ask the Agent to display the Gibraltar Live Viewer by calling
the ShowLiveViewer
Method method. This acts just like the end-user pressing the hot
key, including running on a separate UI thread and will do nothing if
it isn't safe to display the Live Viewer.
Custom Filtering
You can provide a method to filter the log messages displayed by the Live
Viewer, both the built-in Gibraltar Live Viewer and the Live Viewer
Control. This makes it easier to show the viewer to users without
revealing sensitive information.
Display Buffered Messages
When you add your own log viewer control to a form you can choose whether to
have it display the current queue of buffered messages (which will go back to
the start of the process or the maximum buffer size) or have it start
fresh.
Other New Features in This Release
PostSharp 2.0 Support
Gibraltar now includes PostSharp 2.0 as part of the installation and
provides an aspect library for .NET 2.0 and .NET 4.0. See Using PostSharp with Gibraltar for more
information on using PostSharp to instrument your application without code.
Analyst Run at Log On / Keep Running
The Gibraltar Analyst can now be left running more easily and can be set to
automatically start when you log on. In this mode it uses fewer resources
than when the full application is loaded yet still collects and processes
information from a Gibraltar Hub.
Preview Log Message Errors and Warnings in Analyst
The Repository View now can show you the summary of all of the errors and
warnings within each session without having to open the session. This
saves a lot of time when you just want to get an overview of a session.
The summary is based on the results of running session analysis so it's only
available in the User Repository.
Intellisense for Configuration File Editing
The installation will now add an Xsd for Gibraltar configuration for Visual
Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 to make it easier to edit configuration
files.
Add Multiple Metrics to a chart at once
You can now add many metrics to a Metric Chart at the same
time by dragging the folder that contains all of the metrics you want to add
over to the Chart at once.
Visual Studio 2010 Improvements
Gibraltar now ships with integrated help for Visual Studio 2010 and has been
updated to work with the new .NET 4.0 Client Profile.
Defects Fixed In This Release
This is the list of issues fixed since the last release version
(2.1.1.629)
Agent
- Fixed: Packager fails when running in a process set to a neutral
culture (e.g. EN instead of EN-US)
- Fixed: Agent logs excessive information about its own behavior
when exclusively called from the .NET Trace API.
- Fixed: Agent doesn't record time zone name correctly when
recording time change.
- Fixed: Setting SendSessionsOnExit to true after EndSession is
called has no effect.
- Fixed: Windows 7 and Windows Vista Enterprise editions incorrectly
tagged as Windows 2008 Server.
- Fixed: Live Viewer tooltips permanently disabled despite API
setting.
- Fixed: Live Viewer column sorting doesn't work.
- Fixed: Error manager dialog can deadlock application when called during
a form OnLoad event.
- Fixed: Agent shows WinForms/WPF/Console applications as crashed
and loses the last 15 seconds of information if they are still running
when the user logs off or the computer is shutdown.
- Fixed: Extraneous ApplicationExit event can be raised in WinForms and
causes premature EndSession call.
- Fixed: PostSharp Agent triggers code analysis warning due to static
constructor.
- Fixed: Agent can show user name through file paths of assemblies when
in anonymous mode.
- Fixed: Network change events always thing TCP/IP configuration has
changed.
- Fixed: Extremely long command lines can cause the session to fail to
transfer via packages or the Hub.
- Fixed: ASP.NET Web sites can't use Log.SendSessionsOnExit because it
fails to locate Gibraltar.Packager.exe.
Analyst
- Fixed: Chart tooltips are hard to read under Windows XP Standard
Theme.
- Fixed: Expanding a repository view loads its default view and
displays it without changing the apparent selected view.
- Fixed: Repository View doesn't update correctly when all
sessions of the current filtered value are removed.
- Fixed: Creating metric chart of event metric doesn't select the default
event metric value as the initial value.
- Fixed: Repository View doesn't gracefully handle missing session
data (when sessions are removed in the background during display)
- Fixed: Licensing dialog expiration message displays badly on Windows
2000/XP.
- Fixed: Saving a package during application close ignores the save-as
file name.
- Fixed: Double-clicking a sampled metric with a chart active throws
an exception.
- Fixed: Sessions being analyzed when Analyst exits are never
retried.
- Fixed: Sessions by Timeframe summary view ignores future sessions (due
to time zone differences).
- Fixed: Needs to periodically refresh time-based licensing & hub
displays while running
- Fixed: Opening a GLF (raw log file) as a package fails with an
exception.
- Fixed: Attempting to reopen a package that is already open
generates an internal error then displays nothing.
- Fixed: The tools property sheet should not show on the Package property
page as it does not apply.
- Fixed: Marking session as read or unread on start dashboard does
nothing.
- Fixed: Suppressing the "Other" chart group that is composed of
many groups is very slow and can make the application appear to hang.
- Fixed: Suppressing all of the samples within a chart group doesn't
prevent the point from displaying in the chart.
Hub
- Fixed: Automatic Pruning is disabled by default and can't be
enabled.
- Fixed: Records licensing error that public keys do not match.
- Fixed: Clients that fall far behind submitting data can cause server to
take too long to determine the sessions to request, causing timeouts.
- Fixed: Uploading large files can be very slow due to server overhead of
tracking uploaded fragments.
Compatibility Notes
Because of the API
changes, the Assembly Version for the Gibraltar Agent and related
assemblies is now 2.5.0.0. 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.