How Cool? Very Cool! Lightrun named a Cool Vendor by Gartner in Monitoring, Observability, and Cloud Operations

So… this is what it feels like to be COOL! 🙂 

We are thrilled to announce that Lightrun — the world’s first dev-native continuous observability and debugging platform — has been recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor, based on its April 28 report titled, “Cool Vendors in Monitoring, Observability and Cloud Operations” by Padraig Byrne, Pankaj Prasad, Hassan Ennaciri, Venkat Rayapudi, and Gregg Siegfried.

Why Does Gartner Think Lightrun is Cool? 

“Lightrun helps reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) by enabling continuous debugging capabilities. 

Lightrun provides the ability to dynamically instrument code at runtime without the need to release a hot fix or restart the services. 

Whether it is a monolithic application or a microservices architecture, reproducing issues in nonproduction environments can be time-consuming or impossible, especially in complex systems. 

Lightrun bridges the gap between development and production environments, allowing developers to gain observability by adding logs, traces and performance counters in real time.”

 

True Shift-left Dev-native Observability — Made Simple

This quote, from Gartner Cool Vendor report, drives home the main ideas we’ve built Lightrun around. 

But actually, when we say this product is cool, we usually mean it in a much simpler way. We think it’s awesome that this thing we built allows you to add logs and metrics to production applications with a (right-)click of a button.

Think about it for a second.

Doing the exact same thing today, without Lightrun, requires you to:

1. Add new line(s) of code with the information you want to learn
2. Push it to your repository on GitHub, GitLab, etc…
3. Wait for the CI/CD pipeline to finish doing its thing
4. Wait some more for the CI/CD pipeline to finish doing its thing
5. Open the APM / logging tool
6. FIlter for the relevant information
7. Profit!
8. Once you’re done observing the information, remove the code (as to not spam the logs)

With Lightrun, you can simply:

1. Add a new Lightrun Action (logs, snapshots, etc…)
2. Profit!

 Smooth.

Software is Complicated, Y’all

As distributed systems, microservices, and CI/CD are becoming the new norm in the software industry, a new set of challenges and issues arises for the developers who build and maintain software in the wild. 

Multiple pieces of the same application, all replicated across tens, hundreds or sometimes even thousands of different servers make issues and bugs harder to locate and fix. This means that the quick feedback loops agile teams require are hindered by increasingly longer debugging cycles, and the need for (oftentimes multiple) hotfixes and redeployments in order to locate, pinpoint, and gather information about issues with live applications is now a painful day to day experience for the modern day developer.

Lightrun’s vision is to break down those barriers, by allowing developers to gain code-level insights into live applications, without violating the integrity and security of their services that are running in production. 

With this in mind, Lightrun developed the first IDE-native observability platform that enables developers to securely add logs, metrics and traces to production and staging environments in real time, on demand. No hotfixes, redeployments or restarts are required. 

Developers use Lightrun for multiple code-level observability needs, including:

• Code-level alerts – learn in real-time that a specific line in your code was reached in production
• Feature verification – battle-test your features in a QA/ staging/ progressive delivery setting before releasing it to your entire customer base
• Testing/ debugging in production – shine a light on difficult production issues without redeploying, restarting or even stopping the running application

Let’s Talk About Developer-Native Observability and Debugging

Lightrun’s vision goes far beyond faster debugging — it’s about empowering developers to understand and work on live applications, in real time, with a true shift-left developer-native observability platform that causes the least impact as possible to running production systems. 

Lightrun also allows developers to truly understand features and expected behaviour across the application’s entire lifecycle, whichever stage the application may be in at any given time: development, QA/ staging or production. This also allows for end-to-end ownership of debugging, troubleshooting, alerting and incident resolution in real-time by the people that wrote the software — without sacrificing security or compliance. 

Another upside of using Lightrun is substantially improving developer experience. By maximizing productivity, reducing time spent debugging, and allowing developers to detect, locate, and fix issues directly within the context of the tools they are comfortable with — the IDE or the CLI — Lightrun eliminates time-consuming context switching.

Slashing MTTR and Shaving Hours off of Frustrating Debugging Sessions

Currently, Lightrun is trusted by leading global companies, such as Ad-Tech giant Taboola, security leaders WhiteSource and Tufin, Data Analytics powerhouse Sisense, and e-Commerce platform Yotpo, just to name a few. 

The common ground for our customers is the foresight that the challenges currently faced by development teams cause longer debugging cycles and redundant redeployments, which negatively impacts the ability (and agility) to quickly solve issues in production, meet SLAs and break apart difficult customer-facing usability bugs. 

Those challenges are only going to increase in upcoming years, as more and more applications, products and services are moving from a monolith structure to distributed microservices and/ or serverless architectures.

With the ability to add real-time logs, metrics and traces to live applications, companies can now leverage Lightrun to reduce MTTR, save on expensive developer hours spent debugging instead of developing, and guarantee faster, smoother release cycles, with less issues in production, and speedy incident resolution when they do occur. 

So What’s the Bottom Line?

Summing it up, this is what Gartner had to say about the value Lightrun’s solution brings to the table:  

“Lightrun should be of interest to development teams, SREs and operations teams that are accountable for improving observability of complex software products to improve MTTR and resiliency. 

Having a nonintrusive way to add logs and metrics while the service is running in production gives engineers faster access and insight to production issues, and helps enhance their diagnosis and root cause analysis capabilities.

SREs can leverage the feedback from the added instrumentation in production to build better nonfunctional requirements (NFRs) to improve system resiliency and recoverability. 

They also can improve detection to help resolve issues before impacting users or set up autohealing scripts to restore service more quickly.”

… And to End It On a Cool Note:

Last month, we released a cloud-based, self-service version of our dev-native observability platform — you can sign up right here and get all the cool features at the right-click of a button.

About Lightrun

Lightrun is a Tel Aviv-based startup that is transforming the developer experience, bringing a developer-native observability platform. The company is the first to introduce “shift left” observability, empowering developers to gain deeper insights into their live, running applications by allowing them to insert logs, metrics and traces during runtime. Boasting the richest set of observability pillar tools for observing applications directly from within the IDE, Lightrun simplifies every aspect of incident resolution. Lightrun is ISO-27001 certified and is proud to have some of the most innovative technology companies in the world as customers, including Taboola, Sisense, Yotpo, Tufin, WhiteSource, and more. In April 2021, Gartner named Lightrun Cool Vendor in Monitoring, Observability and Cloud Operations. For more information, visit our website or follow Lightrun on Twitter and Linkedin. 

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