Sunday 17 April 2011

Introduction to Gibraltar for C# Log Analysis

Gibraltar monitors .Net application to record errors, events, trace statements and performance metrics then lets you effortlessly analyse the results.

gibrgib

There are three parts to Gibraltar:

Agent

The Agent is a DLL (Gibraltar.Agent.Dll) referenced by your .Net application that records the errors, events and metrics of your app.  It’s really simple to add to your project and can be configured automatically via a wizard or manually by editing an Xml file or programmatically via the Gibraltar API.

Hub

The Hub serves as a delivery mechanism for transporting the results from each Agent to the Analyst.

Analyst

The Analyst is a GUI application that lets developers view and analyse results through drilldowns, filtering and charts.

Some examples of using the Analyst can be seen here:

Analyst-example-1

It’s very simple to drilldown to specific targetted areas using grouping and filtering by categories, namespace/class hierarchies, thread id, severity, etc.

Analyst-example-2

You can see here that the Analyst shows you the source code that has generated the message.

I highly recommend the following video from Gibraltar Software that gives and excellent overview of Gibraltar.  The video also gives an example of teaming the software up with PostSharp, the popular AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) framework:

Using PostSharp with Gibraltar

To download trial versions of Gibraltar and PostSharp please visit the official websites:

http://www.gibraltarsoftware.com/

http://www.sharpcrafters.com/postsharp

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