How OurCrowd Improved its MTTR of Business Critical Issues by 70% with Lightrun Dynamic Observability Platform

The Challenge

OurCrowd is a global venture investing platform that empowers institutions and individuals to invest and engage in emerging companies.

The OurCrowd development team was taking days to drill down into the root cause of production incidents by only using their traditional debugging tools. The OurCrowd engineering team was aiming to reduce the time it takes from getting alerts from their APM tools until the issues are resolved, and also reduce the overall cost associated with developer observability.

Before incorporating Lightrun, the developers received alerts from tools such as RollBar and similar ones, indicating problems in their production environments. In their attempt to resolve these issues, the developers attempted to address the problem by adding additional logs for debugging purposes. Unfortunately, this process took them a minimum of two days, and sometimes even longer, to overcome these obstacles.

Solving the issues was too slow, hence, costly from a developer productivity standpoint.

Proposed Solution 

Lightrun helped the OurCrowd developers by providing them with the ability to add dynamic logs into their production environments and hone in the area without the need to redeploy the apps to obtain more visibility or stop and change the state of the app.

“By using Lightrun, our development team was able to figure out the solution to an extremely complex incident that was hard to resolve  locally, saving both developers time and business implications. The team was able to use Lightrun to quickly add logs and snapshots around the area of the incident, reproduce and fix it.” , Or Angrest, R&D Manager,  OurCrowd

The development team at OurCrowd started using the Lightrun IDE plugin within VSCode to troubleshoot their Node.JS code and add logs without hot-fixing, redeploying or even restarting multiple components in their system.

“Lightrun has transformed my software development process! With its live debugging capabilities, seamless IDE integration, and real-time insights, it’s a game-changing companion that significantly enhances my debugging and development. It’s like having a superpower that amplifies productivity and ensures top-notch applications.”,  Tamir Dagan, Infrastructure Code Team Lead OurCrowd

The Results

Using Lightrun platform, OurCrowd developers improved MTTR by 70% and saved dozens of hours a month 

By utilizing the Lightrun IDE plugin to add Logs and Snapshots to running applications, the development team were able to quickly investigate and resolve bugs in a few hours rather than days. As a best practice, OurCrowd developers also started to use Lightrun as part of their platform engineering tool stack throughout the development process as well and not only during production troubleshooting. This allows developers to pinpoint issues earlier in the SDLC and save costs on logging.

“When it comes to debugging, there’s no place like the server.  And there really is no place like production.  Lightrun’s ability to peer into the server environment (especially production!) gives a glimpse into the jaws of the problem. Once we understand the problem, most of the battle has been fought.”  , Larry Reisler, Core Group Lead,  OurCrowd