Debugging Software

Enterprise applications are veritable volcanoes waiting to erupt in an explosion of logs, exceptions, console messages, etc. that describe the inner workings of the code execution. Most users don’t see all that seething activity and neither do developers, testers, support or operations staff—until a problem occurs.

When an application slows down unexpectedly, malfunctions or is hacked, all those under-the-surface events take on vital importance in finding and fixing the defect. The problem is, out of the literally millions of execution events, where do you look and more importantly, if you do know where to look, how do you get the specific information that you need to diagnose the problem? Another one of those needle and haystack challenges.

Today we’re announcing the solution to this dilemma and it’s called ReplayLIGHTNING. As a real time diagnostic portal integrated with the record/replay functionality of ReplayDIRECTOR, ReplayLIGHTNING presents a graphical summary of execution behavior along with multiple views of the critical execution events that describe a defect or abnormal behavior. Think of an MRI for application execution that can be viewed in an IDE, a web UI or a dashboard in a monitoring or profiling tool.

In addition to providing highly actionable triage information, the other role for ReplayLIGHTNING is to work in conjunction with an execution recording to “data mine” for source level root cause. Because a Replay recording re-executes the binaries on playback, we can “go back in time” to ask questions that you would only know to ask in hindsight. For example, we use our knowledge of a memory leak meltdown to see when objects are allocated and if they somehow missed the GC process. So we can not only describe the memory leak at its messy end, we can also pinpoint where it all started.

ReplayDIRECTOR has always been a great “time machine” for recreating application execution with 100% fidelity. With ReplayLIGHTNING, we’ve added  split-second control to dial in exactly where in that time machine you’d like to travel–with a preview of coming attractions.

Hop on board. www.replaysolutions.com/products/replaylightning