Lightrun Plugin overview¶

The Lightrun plugin provides developers with real-time observability directly within their IDE, enabling the dynamic insertion of Lightrun actions, such as Logs, Metrics, and Snapshots, throughout the source code of running applications. These actions provide on-demand insights without requiring redeployment or disrupting the application.

Note that some actions may vary by IDE and agent type, as not all IDEs currently support every action type.

Supported Lightrun plugins by IDE¶

The Lightrun plugins are available in the following IDEs: IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, Rider, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), and VS Code for the web (vscode.dev).

Lightrun plugin key benefits¶

Lightrun’s IDE plugins are completely self-contained, enabling true full-cycle observability for developers:

Real-time dynamic telemetry¶

Lightrun's proprietary actions include Logs, Metrics, and Snapshots that can be added directly from the IDE. There's no need for CI/CD pipeline changes or application redeployment. Instantly inject telemetry into production code for in-depth, real-time insights.

Security: No source code access¶

Lightrun plugins leverage IDE indexing to map code without needing direct access to your source code. Only metadata—file names and line numbers—are used to identify insertion points for Lightrun actions, ensuring source code security.

In-IDE observability¶

Stay close to the code. Experience observability right inside the editor, simultaneously writing the code and observing the application. All Lightrun output can be viewed directly in the IDE, speeding up the investigation process significantly.

Observability across all environments¶

Lightrun actions can be deployed across all running environments without extra configuration, enabling support for applications running on platforms like Azure VMs and Amazon EC2. The same codebase in multiple environments can be monitored and debugged simultaneously.

Advanced debugging capabilities for developers¶

Lightrun's plugins cater to sophisticated observability needs, enabling developers to:

Access full variable and stack frame content without stopping the application.
Measure in-memory data structure sizes dynamically.
Track the execution count for specific code lines.
Capture contextual data for exception handling in real-time.
Evaluate expressions at any point in the codebase without side effects.
Set up real-time alerts through Slack or any compatible webhook-enabled platform for instant feedback on instrumentation.
Share snapshot hits data with a URL link that can be copied or exported into a Slack or Jira message formats.
Debug at the pod level in Kubernetes (K8s) with support for multiple pods.

Get started¶

To debug remotely with Lightrun, you must first install the Lightrun plugin into your IDE or set up the Lightrun CLI.

The following guides cover installing and working with Lightrun in your IDE.

In addition to the IDE plugins, Lightrun offers a CLI which can be used for automation use cases. Follow the instructions to set up the Lightrun CLI on your computer.

Last update: December 29, 2024