Visual Studio Lightrun plugin quick tour¶

The majority of the work you do with Lightrun, such as troubleshooting, debugging, and performance testing, is performed directly from your integrated development environment (IDE) or the Lightrun CLI.

Using the Lightrun plugin, provided for a variety of popular IDEs (such as VSCode, Visual Studio, IntelliJ, and PyCharm), you can insert Lightrun actions (Logs and Snapshots) anywhere within the source code of your running applications. Also, from within the Lightrun plugin for your IDE, you can view, in real time, the output of Lightrun actions.

And, thanks to Lightrun's comprehensive range of integrations with third-party logging tools, from the plugin, you also can route output from Lightrun Logs and Metrics to your usual logging framework (such as New Relic and DataDog).

Scope of the quick tour¶

This quick tour article provides an overview of the main features and functionalities of the Lightrun plugin for Visual Studio. For detailed information on procedures for running Lightrun actions and managing configurations within Visual Studio, see:

• Lightrun Dynamic Logs in Visual Studio
• Lightrun Dynamic Snapshots in Visual Studio

Lightrun plugin view¶

Upon clicking Lightrun, in the Visual Studio activity bar, the Lightrun sidebar opens. Follow the on-screen instructions to authenticate the plugin.

After authenticating your Lightrun plugin, your Visual Studio IDE as illustrated in the following example.

Top menu bar¶

The top menu provides quick options to add actions, filter resources, and configure general plugin settings. For customers with agent pools enabled, you can switch between predefined agent pools configured by your system administrator.

The Lightrun plugin includes the following three tabs:

• Sources
• Actions
• Snapshot Hits

Selecting any of the three tabs exposes additional menus and options, respectively for managing Agents and Tags, Lightrun actions, and Snapshot hits.

Sources tab¶

The Sources view tab provides additional menus and options for assigning actions to Lightrun agents and tags, as well as selecting various custom sources directly within your Visual Studio IDE.

There are two subtabs in the Sources tab.

• The Agents subtab
• The Tags subtab

Agents¶

The Agents subtab displays a list of live agents running alongside your applications. The Agents subtab appears similar to the following image.

Actions on an agent¶

• Click the overflow menu icon on an agent to display the actions assigned to the agent.

  

Add an action to an agent¶

• Click the add icon on an agent to add an action to the agent.

  

Agent advanced options¶

• Click the menu icon to display the AGENT OPTIONS menu.

  

Agent details¶

• Select Pin to pin the agent to the top of the Agents subtab or select Details to view more information about the agent.

  

The following table summarizes the information displayed in the Agent details window.

Field	Description
Name	The agent's display name or host name if not specified
Host	The name of the machine where the agent is running
Environment	The runtime environment of the application with which the agent is running
ID	A unique identifier, automatically generated for the agent
PID	The process ID (on the machine where the agent is running)
Start time	The time at which the agent started running
API version	The version number of the server connected to the agent
Agent version	The version number of the agent
Tags	Next to Agent details, the names of tags that have been applied to the agent. If there are more than one tag, additional tags are displayed by clicking the icon.

Tags tab¶

The Tags subtab lists all available tags with their associated agents and actions. The Tags subtab appears similar to the following image.

Agents and actions on a tag¶

• Click the Overflow menu icon on a tag to reveal the agents and actions associated with that tag.

Adding an action on a tag¶

• Click the add icon on a tag to add an action to the tag.

Advanced tag options¶

• Click the menu icon to display the TAGS OPTIONS menu.

• Select Pin to pin the tab to the top of the Tags subtab or select Delete to delete the tag.

Sources dynamic search filter¶

From the sources dynamic search field, you can search for Logs, Snapshots, and Metrics attached to specific agents or tags. As you begin typing, the list of relevant agents updates dynamically.

Actions tab¶

The Actions tab lists all Lightrun actions (Logs, Metrics, and Snapshots) currently attached to your code. This includes active actions, disabled actions, expired actions, and actions with errors.

Action-related operations¶

• Click the menu icon to display the ACTION OPTIONS menu.

• Click Edit to edit an action.
• Click Info to view more information about the action.
• Click Go to to navigate the Visual Studio editor to the action file and code line.
• Click Duplicate to create another copy of the action.
• Click Delete to delete the action.

Actions dynamic search¶

The Actions dynamic search filter allows you to search for Lightrun actions using their names, agent names, filename, or code line. You can also sort the action tab with the Filename and Creation time options, or filter with the All, Active, Expired, and Error statuses.

As you start typing, the search filter will update the action list dynamically.

Snapshot Hits tab¶

The Snapshot hits tab allows you to view and manage the snapshot hits captured in your system.

Snapshots search¶

Use the dynamic search filter to filter snapshots base on their names, agent names, filename, or code line. You can also sort the snapshot hit tab with the Name, Start time, and Recently hit options, or load snapshot hits from an external file.

Snapshot hit information¶

• Click on a snapshot hit to view more information about the hit.

  

  The snapshot hit data is divided into three sections.

  Sections	Description
  Snapshot hit details	View more information about the snapshot.
  Snapshot hit variables	View snapshot stacktrace variables.
  Snapshot hit call stack	View snapshot stacktrace call stack (frames).

Share snapshots¶

• Click Share to share the snapshot's data.

  

• Click on a call stack to navigate to the hit's source code and line

Lightrun Console¶

The Lightrun Console lets you view and interact with data from dynamic logs and metrics directly from within your Visual Studio IDE.

The Lightrun Console appears similar to the following image.

• Enter an agent's name into the console’s search bar to display only data from logs and metrics associated with the agent alone.
• Click Clear logs to clear the entire console, and use the My Logs only toggle to configure if you want to view actions created by you alone or actions created by other members of your team in the Lightrun Console.

Lightrun plugin settings¶

• Click the More Options icon at the top of the plugin to open the following menu in the Lightrun plugin.

  

From the Options menu, you can do the following:

View or update plugin connectivity settings¶

• Change the target Lightrun Server URL used for plugin authentication. The default URL is https://app.lightrun.com/.

Refresh plugin or sign out¶

• Refresh the user interface.
• Sign out from the current user.

Access Lightrun resources¶

• Provide feedback
• Open the Lightrun documentation.
• Access the Lightrun Management Portal.