AnaLyzard is a framework to create interactive data analyses to be used as troubleshooting aids. The main work is performed by plug-ins that can be written in any .NET compliant programming language such as C# or Visual Basic.NET. The main advantage of AnaLyzard based reports is that it does not take a guru-class developer to gather information at the customer site anymore: any support personnel that is able to operate windows or command line based appliations can collect data fresh and direct from the production environment.

Since AnaLyzard operates with plug-ins any data source that can be accessed by .NET code can also be analyzed for potential trouble. This includes - but is not limited to - files, the Windows registry, XML information and any database that is supported by ADO.NET, such as Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle.

AnaLyzard provides a Windows based graphical user interface (GUI) application that allows easy access to all items that your plug-in can analyze.

Features include: printing, saving reports as xml file, navigation between report windows and scenario management.

AnaLyzard has two different types of reports: text and image based report output.

Text based report does not mean "plain text" as with so many similar tools. For performance and usability it does not mean HTML either. AnaLyzard uses a simple plain text based structured output format that can display lines, blocks and tables.

It does not take lots of code to write plug-ins for AnaLyzard. Just a few lines of Visual Basic or C# code will suffice to get your AnaLyzard plug-in going!

This way, analyzing capabilities can be built in parallel to normal application development just like unit testing.

Visual Studio 2005 is directly supported (via Visual Basic and C# templates) but not required!

For repetitive analysis AnaLyzard provides a command line (CLI) based application that can create the same reports as the GUI application using the very same scenarios as defined by the application.

Both report types text and image are supported.

Image based reports can provide any image type that is supported by the .NET Framework (as System.Drawing.Image object) for inspection. Along with the image, the plug-in can provide information text. In this case, the information text is plain text only.

Image based reports can be used to display images from database binary large objects fields for example.

Annotations allow the end user to add his or her own comments - to any report as a whole or to single lines within a text based report.

Those annotations are stored together with the report in the xml file for later use.

Scenarios store plug-in item and filter information in files and thus can be used to re-open the analyzed items later on.

Scenarios are a key feature of AnaLyzard. You can create and manage scenario files with the GUI application and use them to run analysis on the contained items with the CLI application.

AnaLyzard runs on Microsoft Windows XP or newer operating systems with the Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0 - freely available from Microsoft - installed.

AnaLyzard uses class libraries (DLL) files as plug-ins. Those plug-ins perform the actual analyzation work and can be written in any Microsoft .NET compliant programming language such as C# and Visual Basic. Templates for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 are included but no specific development environment is required.