Developer Observability Quick Start

Temporary table of contents for Developer Observability

Preview

To enable Developer Observability (Live Debugger), ensure that your One Agent is up to date and deployed correctly and that your admin enables the Developer Observability feature in the settings page. For more detailed information, please see the deployment section.

To start using the Live Debugger:

Step 1 Go to the Live Debugger application

Open the Live Debugger through the applications page

Step 2 Select the instances to debug by applying the relevant filters

To start your debugging session, you'll need to select one or more filters from either the Facets/Categories or by using the free search box.

Filters can also be set through the application properties right pane, which can be opened by selecting on a specific instance item in the list.

Step 3 Source code fetching

Each debug session contains the source code you wish to debug. The Live Debugger application lets you quickly load sources from your local file system and Git provider. When you integrate your source code into the Live Debugger application, it remains between your code repository and your local browser.

There are two main ways you can import your source code:

Automatic fetching

  • The Live Debugger can connect to a repository and automatically fetch the source code for the selected instance. Note: during the early access preview, only BitBucket on-prem can be used for automatic fetching.
  • Your repository may be automatically fetched for the selected instance based on your git permissions, if it has already been set up by your admin.
  • To learn more about Automatic Fetching, see Integrate with your Version Control.

Manual fetching

  • The Live Debugger lets you easily load your relevant source code into the application.
  • Selecting on the + icon on the right top corner of the Set up your session page will open a list with the supported git providers you're able to fetch sources from.
  • In addition, the Live Debugger offers a desktop app for fetching source repositories from a local file system. This allows you to fetch source code from local editions of Git providers.

The Live Debugger integrates directly to the cloud editions of the following Git Providers:

  • Github
  • BitBucket
  • GitLab
  • Azure DevOps

To enable the Live Debugger to integrate with your Git provider:

  1. Go to Settings > Dynatrace Apps > Git On-Premise Servers.
  2. Select Add item. Git Provider: specify your Git provider. Server URL: provide the HTTP/HTTPS URL of your server.
  3. Select Save changes.

Step 4 Place a non-breaking breakpoint

Non-breaking breakpoints are the breakpoints in the Live Debugger that let the OneAgent deployed in your app know what data it needs to fetch, where to fetch it from, and what to do with it.

Select on a line at the point where you'd like to collect a snapshot of data. The breakpoint allows you to collect data about the state of your application without ever stopping it or affecting your end users.

Step 5 Make sure that the code is triggered

After placing a non-breaking breakpoint, make sure your code has been triggered, so that the data will be collected and appear immediately in the application.

Step 6 See the debug data

By selecting on the snapshot, you can see all the local variables and their values, process information, the entire stack trace leading to the line where the breakpoint has been set, and tracing information from the running application. You can also debug code up the stack from the stack trace view, including third-party components.