Live Debugger captures key performance data as working code does its work — Giving developers a real-time view into issues.
By Jack Vaughan
[February 4 ] – At Dynatrace’s Perform 2025 user conference in Las Vegas, the observability software company announced Live Debugger, said to enable developers to non-invasively access runtime operations. Founder and CTO Bernd Greifeneder described this more succinctly, as “non-breaking break points.”
That’s succinct – but it borders on the paradoxical, oxymoronic or contradictory. What goes on?
The basic premise of the portfolio update is to allow developers to set a marker without interfering with the runtime. They can capture stack traces, variable values, and process information without the onerous labor of reproduction and redeployment. The new capabilities are supported directly from the Dynatrace platform or by using the company’s native Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDE plugins. And Dynatrace advises on ways to set breakpoints on interfaced programs where source code is unavailable.
Using Dynatrace’s OneAgent software, Live Debugger instructs your application to immediately collect arbitrary application data—a debug-data snapshot—by adding a non-breaking breakpoint, “all without stopping your application,” the company said.
Developers can thus gain immediate visibility into their code’s execution, to sniff out the worst of all possible bugs: the production bug. Dynatrace just needs the file name and the line number to collect the debug data.
The hope is to end the dreaded Beckett play entitled “Waiting for CI” and the related time lost in attempts to add more logs, bounce the server, change configurations, and go through a lengthy process to try to identify and resolve issues. All to locally reproduce issues that you didn’t want to see in the first place.
At Dynatrace Perform, Greifeneder said customers have reported Live Debugger accelerates the mean time to repair by up to 40%. With some 20-plus years on the performance management scene, he is something of a grand personage of system performance, but still quite animated as he describes Dynatrace innovations [see above].
“To troubleshoot a functional or technical issue, you [gather] all the developers, add more logs, bounce the server, add traces. It takes weeks,” said Greifeneder. “Still, there’s no result.”
That is where Live Debugger will help, he continued. It allows developer to set those non-breaking break points.
“Developers can step through the code line by line to review what’s actually going on, without having to bounce any server [or] any production process that’s going on out there. So that is a massive gain,” he said. “That’s a huge help.”
In effect, Live Debugger brings new meaning to the company name: Dynatrace.
Now in controlled beta, the Live Debugger is due to appear as part of Dynatrace Observability for Developers in the next 90 days.