Lightrun

Lightrun is a developer observability platform built around one powerful idea: you should be able to instrument running code on demand. From an IDE plugin (IntelliJ, VS Code, Visual Studio) or the CLI, a developer can add dynamic logs, virtual snapshots that capture live state like a breakpoint without pausing anything, and on-demand metrics to applications running in production, staging, or Kubernetes, with no hotfix, redeploy, or restart. The agent is designed to be non-breaking and low-overhead, and the company backs the security story with ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, and HIPAA compliance, with only metadata passing through its servers.

Lightrun was founded in 2019, has raised $97 million across four rounds including a 2025 round with Insight Partners and Accel participating, and was named a Gartner Cool Vendor in observability. The honest caveats: it is a proprietary, sales-led enterprise product, so pricing is opaque and the free tier is limited; and dynamic instrumentation of production is powerful but needs governance, since anyone with access can add logging to live systems. For teams drowning in reproduce-locally cycles, though, the MTTR argument is real.

1. Create a Lightrun account and install the IDE plugin (IntelliJ, VS Code, or Visual Studio).
2. Install the Lightrun agent in your application: for Python, pip install lightrun and enable it with your company key at startup; JVM and Node agents are documented in the install guides.
3. The agent appears in the plugin sidebar once the app is running.
4. Add dynamic logs, snapshots, or metrics from the IDE; watch results in the Lightrun console or pipe them to Datadog, Prometheus, or your logging stack.