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Lightrun Launches Free Debugger For Developer-Native Observability
[April 06, 2021]

Lightrun Launches Free Debugger For Developer-Native Observability


Lightrun, the continuous debugging and observability company, today announced the release of a free, self-service version of its popular debugging solution for developers. Lightrun Cloud is not only the most powerful debugger a developer can use to troubleshoot production applications live from within the IntelliJ IDE - but also the easiest to set-up, with a complete self-service experience that gets developers up and running in less than five minutes.

Self-Service Debugger Deploys in Less than Five Minutes

Lightrun specializes in giving developers observability into running code, and pinpointing specific issues directly within the IDEs and CLIs they already use. Lightrun Cloud is optimized for debugging modern application architectures like containers, microservices and serverless, where the degree of difficulty is very high for pinpointing and reproducing bugs in production, as services and instances run across more than one machine. The dozens of organizations and development teams that have adopted Lightrun tend to be heavy users of Docker and Kubernetes, Spring Boot, Tomcat, Jetty, microservices frameworks like MicroProfile and Quarkus, and popular frameworks in big data and stream processing, such as Apache Spark and Apache Flink.

"Distributed frameworks are the cornerstone of the most interesting cloud-native development use cases today, but all of these frameworks also carry their own complexities and opportunities for user error," said Ilan Peleg, co-founder and CEO of Lightrun. "Lightrun is particularly popular with developer teams that are shipping frequently, embracing failure, and who need the fastest possible way to identify and fix bugs in production. Lightrun Cloud is a free SaaS (News - Alert) offering that gives developers the easiest way to isolate bugs in running production systems -- everything from logic bugs based on developer error, to system related bugs based on cluster deployment and configuration. These are the types of bugs that are extremely difficult to find, but increasingly common while orchestrating these complex distributed systems."

"Lightrun has been a game-changer for us," said Rami Stern, R&D infrastructure team leader at Taboola, the top content discovery platform worldwide, whose ads reach more than 44 percent of the total Internet population every day. "With Lightrun we shortened our development process significantly by skipping iterative deployment cycles when adding logs and metrics. A day's work turned into just one hour. Lightrun provided us with new observability into our production environment that was not accessible to us beforehand. Lightrun is a key component in our eveloper toolset here at Taboola and one of our development best practices."



Logs, Snapshots and Metrics in Live Production Code "Shift Left" to the IDE

Historically, observability into production applications relies on the paradigm of collecting massive volumes of logs, storing those logs, then analyzing them through application performance monitoring tools (APM (News - Alert)), like New Relic, Splunk and other popular tooling. Lightrun Cloud inverts the model -- instead of logging everything and working backwards, the platform gives developers "shift left" observability from within the tooling they already use (IDEs, CLIs, VCS), and the ability to add log lines to running applications. This new paradigm allows developers to own debugging within the software development lifecycle, reducing the time to discovery and reproduction of bugs, and significantly cutting operational and observability costs.


  • Lightrun Cloud for SaaS Debugging - In multi-tenant SaaS applications, bugs are hard to detect during development and testing, because issues tend to be specific to configuration- / tenant- / user environment- variables. These issues tend to only surface in production, and Lightrun Cloud gives developers a way to pinpoint the specific environmental dynamics of where the problem is occurring in running code.
  • Lightrun Cloud for Complicated Performance Issues - Many performance issues can only be pinpointed when software is running in production, due to scale, races, data volumes and other strains that are only present in the production environment. In production environments, profilers and packet analyzers impose too big of a footprint as they instrument every invocation of every piece of code, every function innovation, and exit. Lightrun Cloud brings a more surgical approach to generating performance metrics like time measurements, counters and more - while presenting a very small footprint and keeping the service reliable.
  • Lightrun Cloud for Distributed Frameworks - Frameworks give powerful capabilities to developers building distributed applications, but they also present many opportunities for bugs. Apache Spark jobs, for example, are full of unique real-data problems like fuzzy records, performance problems due to bad partitioning, serialization errors and more. Lightrun Cloud allows developers to inspect a live Spark job, capture real-time data, and inspect the RDD without bringing the application down. Lightrun Cloud allows developers to capture the many benefits of distributed applications, while shortening the debugging process and allowing bug detection in real-time instead of waiting for redeployments and reproducing environments.

Product Availability

Lightrun Cloud is available at https://lightrun.com

Supporting Resources

About Lightrun

Lightrun is a Tel Aviv-based startup that is transforming the developer experience, bringing a developer-native observability platform. The company is the first to bring "shift left" observability, giving developers deeper insights into running applications by allowing them to insert logs, metrics and traces and more during runtime. Boasting the richest set of observability pillar tools for observing applications directly from within the IDE, Lightrun simplifies every aspect of incident resolution. Lightrun is ISO-27001 certified and is proud to have some of the most innovative technology companies in the world as customers, including Taboola, Sisense, Tufin and more.


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