How Gibraltar Gives John Karbin
More Time for New Features

An Expensive Failure

As the leading kiln manufacturer in Europe for softwood sawmills, Valutec provides the main control system for the wood drying process. It is a slow, complicated process that largely runs without an operator monitoring the system. Given the high cost of raw material, stability is critical. Any failure in the process can cause irreparable damage to the wood. As you can see, we had a critical need for logging.

An Extensive Effort

Our previous method was to have our logging framework emit the logs to a set of text files. These had to be split into different files to get a better view. While this met our needs to some extent, we found it made errors and warnings very difficult to track, putting the raw material at risk. Plus it was time consuming to use scripts to clear old log files and to write custom compression on text files. We had errors and warnings slipping through unnoticed.

Gibraltar Gave Us Stability

As soon as I started Gibraltar's real-time viewer, I realized that this was a huge improvement in clarity for viewing log files. With the Analyst tool, it was amazing how much easier it was to track and analyze errors and warnings. We no longer had to use scripts to clear old log files. We no longer had to write custom compression. Best of all, we no longer had to tolerate errors or warnings slipping through unnoticed. This meant we can be confident in our ability to safeguard the process.

Why I'd Recommend Gibraltar

Gibraltar has had a profound effect on our work. It helped us increase the stability of the program. Perhaps most important, Gibraltar gives us more time to spend on coding.