Lightrun Overview¶

Lightrun is a developer-centric observability platform created by developers, for developers. Its core mission is to empower developers like you to dynamically check for issues and debug your code on the fly, liberating you from the need to predict every imaginable edge case or attempt to recreate unexpected issues in different environments. At the heart of Lightrun are its proprietary Lightrun Actions, which encompass dynamic logs, snapshots, and metrics. These Actions grant you unparalleled access to code-level insights from any line of code, providing invaluable context during exceptions and augmenting your ability to monitor and comprehend code execution across various pathways.

What can I use Lightrun for?¶

Lightrun offers code-level deep inspection at the micro-granular level, allowing you to troubleshoot, test, and debug your applications by investigating issues directly from the environment where they are running, whether it's development, staging, or production. No hotfixes, restarts, or redeployment are required. Seamlessly integrating into your personal workflow and toolchain including IDEs and APMs (Application Performance Monitoring), and logging tools, Lightrun facilitates swift code instrumentation and issue resolution.

Furthermore, Lightrun eliminates the need for costly developer lifecycle operations like local replication or software version updates merely to incorporate new logs or metrics. By enabling developers to observe and tackle the ‘unknown unknowns’ on the fly, Lightrun delivers unparalleled observability without necessitating redeployment, ensuring maximum efficiency and productivity.

Bridging the observability gap¶

Traditionally, exceptions, logs, performance metrics and traces have been embedded in code during the development stage. But, with the advent of the cloud, followed by microservices and serverless architectures, an observability gap emerged between development and production environments, rendering it nearly impossible to anticipate production-only issues or reproduce them. Lightrun is the first platform to shift observability left, granting developers 100% visibility into their code, regardless of the deployment environment or infrastructure, whether it's monolithic or highly distributed.

Using Lightrun, developers enjoy transparent access to exceptions as they occur, allowing them, on demand and in real time, to securely add logs, metrics, and traces to their application code while its running in production, staging, or development environments.

Lightrun typical use cases¶

Developers use Lightrun for multiple and diverse code-level observability goals, including:

Testing and debugging¶

• Implementing code-level alerts.
• Verifying new features as part of progressive enhancement delivery, utilizing techniques like blue/green toggles and feature flags.
• Testing and debugging within progressive enhancement workflows.
• Onboarding new developers with legacy applications.
• Investigating code flows for better understanding and optimization.
• Shifting left observability by debugging:
  • CI/CD Pipeline.
  • Distributed cloud-native applications.
  • Legacy and monolith applications.
  • Third-party or operating system code.
  • ML pipelines and Big Data infrastructure.
  • Feature flag activations providing full visibility into the delivery process.

Performance analysis¶

• Running performance analysis with on-demand metrics.
• Conducting pinpoint performance monitoring.
• Prioritizing security CVEs.

Troubleshooting¶

• Migrating data centers to cloud or microservices architectures.
• Troubleshooting microservices, serverless computing, and Big Data workers.

Lightrun features and benefits¶

Lightrun enables in-depth introspection of operational production code at the finest granularity, without any adverse effects. By securely adding Lightrun's logs, snapshots, and performance metrics, you can debug running production code, on demand in real-time, as needed.

The following table provides a summary of Lightrun's capabilities and the benefits it offers to developers.

Lightrun supported deployment types¶

Lightrun comes in the following deployment types:

• Multi-Tenant SaaS deployment: Utilize a management server hosted on shared infrastructure.
• Single-Tenant SaaS deployment: Utilize a Lightrun-hosted, private management server.
• Private Deployment In the Cloud: Utilize a privately exposed (not accessible from the public internet) management server, on a dedicated AWS account.
• Fully Air-Gapped, on-premise deployment: Utilize a self-hosted management server without exposing any data to the outside world.

Get started¶

1. Learn about Lightrun's architecture and how the platform works.

2. Give Lightrun a try or embark on your journey to experience its debugging capabilities firsthand.

3. Start using Lightrun in 3 easy steps.

   1. Install the Lightrun plugin for your IDE:

      - IntelliJ, PyCharm, and WebStorm

      - Visual Studio

      - Visual Studio Code (VS Code)

   2. Install the Lightrun agent for your runtime environment:

      - Java agent

      - Python agent

      - Node.js agent

      - .NET agent

   3. Add your first action.