Lightrun Unveils Game-Changing Visual Studio Extension and Dynamic Traces at AWS ReInvent 2024

As we kick off the AWS re:Invent 2024 conference, we’re thrilled to introduce two major developer observability and live debugging advancements that bring even greater power and flexibility to developers and engineering teams everywhere. These new product capabilities — the Lightrun Visual Studio Extension and Lightrun Dynamic Traces — are designed to elevate customers’ observability workflows and streamline their development processes directly within their IDE. With these features, Lightrun continues to drive forward innovation, making it easier than ever to monitor, debug, and gain insights in real time without leaving the coding environment.

🚀 NEW : Visual Studio Extension 

As part of Lightrun supported runtimes, users can now troubleshoot .NET live applications written in C# directly from Visual Studio IDE which is the most comprehensive IDE for .NET and C++ developers on Windows. 

Specifically, developers can utilize the Lightrun context-aware IDE extension and troubleshoot applications on Windows OS to:

• Add Lightrun Logs and Snapshots straight from the IDE interface
• Observe their live applications alongside the source code
• Remain highly secure and performant: no access to source code required

This new extension for Visual Studio IDE, is the first and only in the market and it’s now available as part of Lightrun’s public beta!

To get started with the extension, please visit the visual studio extension marketplace and download the package (Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio 2022).

• Lightrun extension for Microsoft Visual Studio 2019
• Lightrun extension for Microsoft Visual Studio 2022

Once done, please use the Book a Demo on our website to contact Lightrun and get the support needed to get started with the new platform. 

You can also refer to Lightrun’s hosted session at the Microsoft Visual Studio Toolbox show and see the new extension in action: Live Debugging with Dynamic Instrumentation Using Lightrun

Lastly, a full user’s guide and documentation for Lightrun for Visual Studio is available here: https://docs.lightrun.com/visual-studio/visual-studio-plugin-quick-tour/

🚀New : Lightrun Dynamic Traces 

Lightrun Dynamic Traces lets developers troubleshoot application flows more efficiently by capturing context-specific and highly granular data from various points in the application. These traces group multiple snapshots, enabling developers to trace requests across multiple code areas (e.g., from a REST API to the service logic) without needing excessive logging. This approach helps identify the root cause of complex issues faster and significantly reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Getting started with Lightrun’s Dynamic Traces is easy. Once you’re logged into the platform and the application is running with the Lightrun agent, use the new Traces tab within the IntelliJ IDE plugin to add your entry point snapshot and than add the other relevant trace member snapshot to gain complete visibility into your application flow.

Among the benefits and value adds that developers can gain from Traces are:

• The ability to set a specific condition as an entry point for a trace and add more snapshots as trace members to understand the root cause of an issue. 
• Gain high granular data within an application flow using a single trace.
• Insert and consume traces and snapshots without ever leaving the IDE
• Pinpointing specific requests and flow branches based on powerful conditions and flexible starting point
• Add Dynamic trace in real time without the need for code changes and redeployments
• All snapshots are performant, read-only, and safe

To learn more about Lightrun’s dynamic traces feature which is also in public beta, please visit our page and Book a Demo with us.

See below a demonstration of how Dynamic Traces works within the IntelliJ IDEA plugin on a Java application (PetClinic):

Summary

As we kick off an exciting week at ReInvent, we are thrilled to share these major announcements with our developer community and hope that such innovations will boost both their productivity as well as MTTR (mean time to resolution) of critical incidents as they troubleshoot remote and distributed workloads running on AWS EKS and other deployments.