LogViewPlus 3.0 is here!  Now with SQL reporting and custom dashboards.  We've been working on this release for over 18 months so it's really exciting to finally get it out the door and start gathering feedback.

Ever since we released version 1.0, we wanted the ability to go deeper into our logs.  The classic use case became graphing CPU and memory from parsed log entries.  Not because that is particularly helpful in itself (there are better ways to track machine metrics), but because this was a great example of the kind of reporting we wanted to do.  It seems log files offer an infinite number of ad-hoc reporting scenarios.

The problem wasn't parsing the data or graphing it.  The problem we had was transforming it.  Often before you can report on data you need to clean it up, transform, or aggregate it.  How can we manipulate the data to get it into the right format?  We scratched our heads on this one for a while.  We even considered building our own spreadsheet - which would have been a nightmare!    Fortunately, we realized the answer was staring us right in the face - SQL. 

Structure Query Language was designed to solve exactly this problem.  Querying and transforming large sets of data for the purpose of reporting.  It was designed to be simple so that non-technical users can use it - and they have.  SQL is probably the single most popular computer language, so some of the learning curve could be assumed. 

SQL just made sense.  Once we had this piece of the puzzle, everything else just clicked.

Combining SQL with log files is radically new.  We expect some users will look at this with a bit of confusion.  Why do you need this?  This is a new capability and it is going to take time for users to understand the kinds of problems that can now be solved.  There is a lot to be gained by making problems so easy to solve that you can do in seconds what used to take days.  It opens a lot of possibilities, but it takes time to understand that those doors are now open.

There is still more work to do.  In a sense LogViewPlus 3.0 is still 1.0 for SQL and dashboard reports.  But we needed to get this release out because there is a ton of other great features that we have been sitting on like improved Windows Event Log access and a new data indicator.  It's also been 6 months since our last release, so it's time to get back into our usual 2-3 month release cycle.

Breaking Changes

This release will break custom log readers.  We have had to change the ILogReader interface to support some ideas that we have on improving memory management.  We added a new ILogMem reference which needs to be used when creating new log entries.  Making the code change should be straight-forward, but we understand the work involved with communicating and redeploying within an organization.  Apologies for the inconvenience.

What's Next?

LogViewPlus v3 releases will continue to improve on our new SQL reporting capability in much the same way that v2 releases improved connectivity.  Before the second half of 2023, we want LogViewPlus to have built in reporting capability for web logs, Java GC logs, and Windows security logs.  We are actively looking for more ideas.  Do you know of a widely used logging format which could benefit from a pre-built report?  Let us know - we would really appreciate your insight.

In the next release, we want to take a look at memory usage.  LogViewPlus has always been a memory intensive application, but we have some ideas on how this can be improved.  We are going to experiment a bit and hopefully the next release will have an improved memory footprint.

Now that the 3.0 release is out, we also want to focus more on quality issues such as improved performance and 4K monitor support (high DPI).

That's it for now. Check out the latest release and let us know what you think!

Toby