Today we are excited to announce LogViewPlus v2.5 - our biggest release ever! Performance improvements, bug fixes and new features. There is a ton of good stuff in this release, but I just want to highlight a few features...

First, we have updated report interaction in LogViewPlus. It is now much easier to drill down, navigate the data and create sub-filters.



Additionally, log entry messages are now automatically post processed to extract message templates. Message reporting based on templates helps you understand which messages are occurring independent of data contained within the message.

This is a good step in the right direction, but there is more we can do here. What we really want to do is graph the extracted message data. This is something we will be looking into in an upcoming release.

We have also added support for ETW Event Tracing as an add-on. Adding features to LogViewPlus through an add-on is a new technical direction for us and we are really excited by the potential. It allows us to add features which require a high number of supporting libraries - possibly under different licensing terms - in a way that targets only the users interested in those new features.

The ETW add-on also includes prompts to check requirements and guide users through the installation process.



LogViewPlus now requires .Net 4.7.2. This version of .Net is widely distributed.  Installation can also be handled by our installer if necessary.

.Net 4.7.2 brings noticeable performance improvements (particularly at start-up) as well as advanced features like file system path lengths greater than 255 characters. It also provides a foundation for some important upcoming changes - such as improved support for high resolution screens.

On the development front, there were a few lessons learned for us in this release. This release took about 4 months - which is much longer than we anticipated. Part of this is because of feature creep and part of it is because of things outside of our control. In general, we think shorter release cycles are better and will try to avoid releases this large in the future.

One reason for the delay in this release is that we have greatly improved our automated testing. This investment took more time than expected, but we are very pleased with the results. The changes improved quality in this release and will no doubt pay dividends going forward.

We have also updated our documentation. The previous documentation version was 2.4 - which is too far out of date. Out of date documentation is not only confusing for customers, but it also becomes more difficult to update. This is a learning lesson for us and going forward we will keep the documentation more in sync with the current release.

What's next? Version 2.5 is a milestone for us because all of the major data sources we wanted to support have now been added. Of course, we will be adding additional data sources going forward - but I do not expect it will be the focus of a release the way it has been over the past year.

Now that we have all of this data from different sources, it is time to focus on enrichment and reporting. How can we drill down into the data and quickly generate reports based on information contained within the log entry?

We are also interested in team features. How can we share workspaces more easily? How can we save and restore an analysis session?

Now that we are pulling in data from so many different sources, there are lots of possibilities. I expect incremental changes as we build up to a 3.0 release with high DPI support, triggers and text transformations.

For now - check out v2.5 and let us know what you think!

Toby