Lightrun, a provider of a continuous observability and debugging platform, recently announced integrations with six popular tools used by developers to help streamline the delivery of real-time observability for enterprise organizations.

To learn more, VMblog reached out to Tom Granot, a developer advocate at Lightrun, where he works on re-shaping what production observability looks like.

VMblog:  To kick things off, can you start by telling us a little bit about Lightrun and the product?

Tom Granot:  Lightrun is a Tel Aviv-based startup with the first complete continuous observability and debugging platform. Covering all three pillars of observability, Lightrun allows developers to easily and securely add logs, performance metrics and traces to production and staging environments in real-time, on-demand. Lightrun replaces the iterative, non-agile process required today for debugging live applications and gives developers 100% code-level observability and faster resolution of production issues.

VMblog:  Have you seen developer behavior change during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Granot:  COVID-19 threw the world of software development into a spiral. Changes to the communication channels between team members, the ways in which developers collaborate to solve issues together and a change in the security landscape are all very evident, across many of the organizations we routinely speak to. With such extreme changes in some circumstances expected to become permanent, these organizations must face the challenge head-on. One of the tools that already had started falling behind even before this big shift is the remote debugger; naturally, its faults have become even more obvious since the start of this new age.

VMblog:  What is remote debugging, and how does Lightrun do it differently?

Granot:  Remote debugging is very similar to regular, local debugging, except for the fact that local debuggers work with local applications, and remote debuggers work with remote applications - usually hosted on customer-facing production servers. Lightrun was built from the ground up to allow for real-time, on-demand troubleshooting of production applications. Lighrun offers an innovative approach to debugging by allowing developers to quickly shed a light on the true state of running applications - leading to lower MTTR (Mean Time To Resolve) and removing friction from the incident resolution process.

VMblog:  Lightrun recently announced several key integrations with popular dev tools.  How do they benefit users?

Granot:  The integrations that were announced with Datadog, IntelliJ IDEA, Logz.io, Prometheus, Slack and StatsD will streamline the delivery of real-time observability for enterprise organizations. These new integrations extend the reach of Lightrun's real-time logs, metrics and traces and allows developers to inspect them inside the organization's existing observability infrastructure. The seamless incorporation of 100% code-level visibility into the existing developer workflow increases developer productivity and frees developers to focus on providing new business value instead of fighting fires.

VMblog:  Shift left is a big movement right now.  Tell me how and where that is incorporated into the debugging process and the benefits to organizations.

Granot:  By shifting left, organizations will be able to break down information silos and allow for speedy incident resolution. In a world where service uptime is incredibly important and high-availability is becoming table stakes for software companies, shifting left will be the difference between losing and winning a specific market through the ability to offer superbly better reliability than the competition.

VMblog:  What's next for Lightrun?

Granot:  Lightrun is hard at work adding even more integrations to support more developer workflows - allowing on-call teams to slash MTTR with the granular, code-level visibility that on-demand, real-time logs, metrics and traces provide.

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