How Gibraltar Eliminates Guesswork
on Jon Tarrant's Team

A Good Question

As project manager at Mind Over Machines, I needed an authoritative source of information, independent of personal bias. Problem was, unless I could get in the code and understand how things worked, I had no way to monitor the health of the customer’s application or identify real-time errors. Instead my team and I had to guess about what went wrong or right. And when somebody said, “this release is really good,” I had to ask, “what are you basing that on?”

A Bad Answer

If you can’t trace a problem, you can only guess why it happened. Sure, you have the option of calling the customer and bothering them, but chances are, they won’t remember what they did, and you won’t get the answer you need. Without a reliable logging tool, you are stacking the odds against yourself and tying your hands behind your back.

Gibraltar Gave Us a Real-World Solution

Gibraltar is a reliable logging tool. It’s collecting data when things are going well and when they aren’t. For example, this morning, I opened Gibraltar and saw that a GDI+ exception happened. I can see right away exactly where the crashed occurred and that it was using over 800 MB of RAM at the time. Without Gibraltar, how would I have solved the problem? A lot of times, exceptions happen that don’t interrupt the flow of the app, and my customers don’t even know right away that there is a problem. Gibraltar lets me know. I can see things that aren’t evident to the customer, find the issues and address them.

Why I'd Recommend Gibraltar

You need to be able to look at the system as a whole. It’s never just one thing. That’s what drew me to Gibraltar. Its holistic approach lets us bring an engineering approach to solving problems. I’ve got objective real-world information about what actually happened. And I’ve got it right at my finger tips, without having to guess.