Gibraltar: The Best Analysis Tool for Log4Net

Log4Net is Powerful and Flexible, But Now What?

Log4Net is a powerful and flexible logging system which lets you organize the logging done by your application into a Logger hierarchy which can be fed to various Appenders filtered by severity level and even selecting different data elements to include for each.  But how do you decide what parts of the log event data to include, or what severity level filter to apply so that you collect the data you need without filling up the hard drive? 

  • You could just guess at it, but when you later need the data to diagnose and fix a problem, you may find that a vital clue for that problem was among the parts discarded by your best-guess filtering and never recorded.
  • You could record it all, but that data could add up quick and still leave you with the problem of what to do with the log files being recorded.
  • You could spend time writing a tool to manage all these log files, purge the old ones, and somehow get the data from your customers back to your support staff and developers, but that's time you could better spend improving your product.

Gibraltar Makes It Easy

Gibraltar is an all-in-one application monitoring solution for .NET easily integrates with Log4Net and other logging systems and also with the built-in Trace and Debug capabilities. A Gibraltar Appender for Log4Net is included in the Gibraltar distribution and adapters are also easy for you to write for other logging systems.

The Gibraltar Agent - which you can freely and easily deploy with your application - can be integrated into your application by configuring the Gibraltar Appender for Log4Net in your app.config.  You don't need to pre-filter with Gibraltar; you can just collect it all.

Gibraltar can easily package and send you the session data

The Gibraltar Agent stores all of its collected data for an application session in a compact format to reduce the disk space used and it automatically manages the disk space used by logging on a client system. 

Older session files will be automatically purged by age to maintain your targeted limits, and long-running sessions will automatically roll over to a new file when they reach a targeted size to allow older portions of that session to be discarded as needed. 

You can also configure a minimum available space required so your logging will never use up the last remaining space on the hard drive.  When a user encounters a problem with your application, the associated session data can be automatically packaged and sent to your support staff or developers for analysis.

Analysis Made Easy

With the collected sessions in hand, the Gibraltar Analyst helps you quickly select sessions of interest to examine in detail and helps you find the problem area with the higher-severity messages.  Your organized hierarchy of Logger names is preserved as the Category of each log message, and the Gibraltar Analyst lets you instantly filter the log message view by this hierarchy and also highlight a category of interest so those messages stand out.  The same instant filtering can also be done by Class and Namespace, and a quick severity filter can be applied if needed, as well as a custom filter when the instant filters just aren't powerful enough.

Jump right to the error, with or without filtering

So, instead of filtering up front and risk throwing out important data you can apply filters dynamically during analysis to narrow your focus to the data most helpful for a particular investigation, and then bring other data back in when you need to see what's happening in a larger context.  The Gibraltar Analyst also provides a useful reporting system to help you analyze trends across many sessions.

Share Insight Quickly

Generate reports with built-in reporting analytics

The Gibraltar Analyst also provides a useful reporting system to help you analyze trends across many sessions.  List the most common errors across all collected sessions of your product and break them down by category (i.e. by the Logger name) so you can know what areas of your product need the most attention.  You can also analyze the overall health of your product with usage and errors broken down by your product version and by the OS versions its being run on.

Whether you're monitoring an in-house tool or deploying a commercial product in the field you'll have real data from which to make informed decisions on how to spend your resources.

The reporting system is also designed to be extensible - if it doesn't have a report you need today, contact us to discuss your options!

Go Deeper

The best way to understand how this can change the way you look at your application is to download Gibraltar and try it for free for 30 days.  The Agent is always free, so you can be sure to capture the data when it happens and look at it later at your convenience.

If you want to read more about collecting, managing, and analyzing log data with Gibraltar check out these pages in our product documentation: