Frequently Asked Questions - Try It

This FAQ answers general questions that have come up for people considering a Gibraltar trial.

  1. Why do I need Gibraltar?
  2. Where does it fit in my software development process?
  3. What are the key parts of Gibraltar?
  4. What type of applications will Gibraltar work with?
  5. How safe is Gibraltar? Will it slow down my application? Use a lot of memory or disk?
  6. How easy is it to distribute Gibraltar?

Have more questions?  Please contact us or have a live chat with one of our developers so we can make sure all your questions are answered.

Other FAQs

The Licensing FAQ and Subscriptions FAQ explain how we've made Gibraltar easy to buy and own.

The Support FAQ answers technical questions that have been asked by Gibraltar users.

Why do I need Gibraltar?

Gibraltar makes it easier to develop and support your applications. It tracks errors, performance metrics, and feature usage so have a better understanding of your users and where you should be focusing development efforts. (more...)

Where does it fit in my software development process?

Gibraltar helps during construction, test, and maintenance.

  • In development, Gibraltar complements debuggers and profilers to fix bugs and bottlenecks.
  • In system testing, Gibraltar simplifies the the process of reproducing and correcting bugs.
  • During beta testing, Gibraltar can track who's run the software, how often and which features they're using.
  • After release, Gibraltar streamlines customer support and provides the detailed usage information to guide an ongoing customer experience improvement program (CEIP).

What are the key parts of Gibraltar?

Gibraltar consists of three parts:

  • Gibraltar Agent is a lightweight .NET assembly that runs in-process within your applications safely and efficiently collecting errors, events, metrics and configuration information.
  • Gibraltar Analyst is a desktop application used to manage and analyze Gibraltar logs.
  • Gibraltar Hub is a web service that automates the transmission of logs from Agents to Analysts.

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What type of applications will Gibraltar work with?

The Gibraltar Agent is compatible with any .NET application using .NET 2.0 and later. It has special features for ASP.NET as well as WinForms/WPF applications and it's also useful for Windows/web services.

Silverlight and Mono are not yet supported but will be included in a future release.

How safe is Gibraltar? Will it slow down my application? Use a lot of memory or disk?

Gibraltar was designed to do no harm from day one. It's safe and efficient in highly multithreaded or single threaded applications and does the vast majority of its work on background threads so as to cause negligible latency to your applications. It makes efficient use of memory and writes data to compressed files to mimimize disk consumption. Moreover, Gibraltar manages local storage consumption within configurable storage limits and can automate transmission of logs by email or web service calls. Log transmission is restartable, transactional and tolerant of intermittent network connectivity.

How easy is it to distribute Gibraltar?

The only file you need to add to your distribution is the Gibraltar Agent, housed in one assembly (Gibraltar.Agent.dll). At your discretion you can also distribute the Packager to make it easier for end users to submit diagnostic information to you. It is a single assembly (Gibraltar.Packager.exe). More details on deploying Gibraltar are in our documentation.