PPG Reduces MTTR from Weeks to Hours through Shift Left Runtime Debugging with Lightrun Developer Observability Platform

By using Lightrun, PPG’s engineering team is able to resolve complex issues in minutes instead of days

About PPG

PPG is a global leader in paints, coatings, and specialty materials, serving industries such as aerospace, automotive, and construction. With a history spanning over a century, PPG is known for its commitment to innovation, sustainability, and quality, helping businesses worldwide protect and enhance their products.

The Challenge

My company has strict code guidelines, rigorous code reviews, and exhaustive QA testing across multiple environments. As a result, we rarely see bugs or defects in production. However, when a bug makes it to production, debugging becomes complicated due to data mismatches between lower and higher environments and the lack of universal observability. 

While we have logs in multiple parts of our code, they are sometimes insufficient. Often, we must create new logs to track variable values or verify if a request reached a specific function.

This process is time-consuming, as it requires modifying the code, creating a pull request, and redeploying the code.

From a technology stack, we are using Microsoft Azure and Visual Studio Code IDE as part of our software development. Since our architecture is microservices based, we are maintaining and supporting a large scale of backend code.

Proposed Solution

By integrating Lightrun, PPG’s engineering team gained the ability to add logs and snapshots on demand across multiple environments, eliminating the need for code changes and redeployments. This enhanced their Shift-Left observability strategy, allowing developers to securely debug production systems in real-time. Lightrun’s read-only, on-the-fly instrumentation streamlined issue triage, reduced dependency on subject matter experts, and enabled faster routing of problems to the right teams.

Lightrun’s Production Debugging as Part of PPG’s Shift Left Observability Strategy 

Lightrun played a pivotal role in empowering the entire PPG application engineering organization to achieve its objectives through the deployment of a dynamic developer observability platform. By providing developers with secure, read-only access to their production environments, Lightrun allowed the team to drop into the software in any environment and begin to interrogate the system based on its current running requirements, reducing the amount of time and subject matter expertise required to reduce time to triage issues and allowing them to route issues to the right team. 

“Lightrun is a powerful addition to our development toolkit that adds on-demand code observability, saving deployment and development time” –  Miguel Morgado, Software Engineering Leader, PPG

Conclusion

Lightrun transformed PPG’s debugging workflow, reducing the time and effort required to investigate production issues. By enabling live observability without code changes, PPG significantly improved debugging efficiency, reduced MTTR, and empowered developers to maintain high software reliability.