05. Nov. 2013 by Helen
Version 3.1.0 of the Retrospective Log Analyzer program has just been released and wants to give you a hand to simplify, accelerate and improve your tasks to collect useful data from distributed log files.
Retrospective’s powerful search and monitoring engine has already proven its robustness, efficiency and speed in previous releases. It is the core piece that makes a considerable difference compared to other log analyzing solutions. For version 3.1.0 we therefore concentrated on features that improve security, flexibility and usability.
All passwords entered in Retrospective are now encrypted and no longer readable by unauthorized persons. When you export log configurations to share them with other persons in your organization or to keep them for later use, you can now choose to keep these encrypted passwords in the export file or wipe them out completely. This feature allows granting access to remote log files to your collaborators without disclosing the passwords to your servers.
Many users requested a shorthand definition of the search scope. Though the log data profiles are powerful when dealing with complex setups, sometimes they just wanted to search some specific files. The search definition panel now offers an easy way to access files without the use of a profile. Through a single click to the right of the profile selector you can choose the folder or files to be used for searching log data.
Alternatively, this shorthand configuration can be saved to a profile for future use.
In the preferences dialog, more settings are available for changing the look and behavior of Retrospective:
The date/time format to be used in search filter criteria can now be freely defined
Font chooser dialog for customizing the data representation in the result table
Default visibility of individual columns in the result table upon a single mouse click
New monitoring starting offset lets you define how much existing data is initially retrieved when monitoring (tailing) is started
The result table and some of its associated components have been enhanced to assist the workflow of Retrospective users:
A new search can be started based on a result entry by simply selecting the appropriate item from a pop-up menu. This feature retrieves contextual data that appeared in that same file just before and after a selected result entry.
Multiple result entry selection has been added. A range of result entries can now be copied into your favorite text editor. It is also possible to successively delete series of result entries to narrow down to relevant log data.
The local result filter now keeps its own history. Previously used filters can be retrieved by simply pressing arrow down.
A normalized log level column was added. The log level appears in a normalized form (e.g. “ERROR”) regardless if it was logged in another language (e.g. “GRAVE” in French). The log level column is sortable and allows for quick filtering by log levels.
There have been more improvements that may be of higher or lower importance to you, depending on the way you work with Retrospective. Almost all the changes we introduced in this release were triggered by user feedback, so…
We would like to sincerely thank all the people that contacted us with bug reports and feature requests. It is your input that allows us to steadily enhance Retrospective. Our apologies to all those who won’t yet find their requested feature in this release. Don’t worry; it is safely kept in our back log.
Retrospective 3.1.0 wants to give you a hand and relieve you of the burden to manually collect, arrange, sort and analyze sort log data from distributed sources. Please accept the offer and give it a try!