Rookout Solves Debugging Serverless at Scale with New Visual Experience

Rookout, the shift-left observability platform, announced their brand new serverless debugging experience. Trying to debug highly ephemeral serverless applications proves difficult for even the most seasoned engineers. Rookout now provides a visual interface that captures serverless functions invoked across a timeline, and then allows developers to zero in and debug the most problematic areas.

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“Traditional APM tools can highlight and alert on problematic areas within serverless applications – but they can’t drill in and extract debugging data,” said Shahar Fogel, CEO of Rookout. “With a few clicks, Rookout users can now set non-breaking breakpoints and visualize the functions being invoked to understand the variables that may be contributing to customer-facing issues.”

Serverless adoption has slowed down despite offering high performance and flexibility to DevOps teams, according to research from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in their report The State of Cloud Native Development. This is in large part due to the difficulty of understanding and troubleshooting problems within AWS Lambda functions that are abstract and highly ephemeral. The median Lambda invocation is less than 60 milliseconds and can happen tens and hundreds of thousands of times throughout a day at scale (source: Datadog).

Another promise of serverless is cost reduction and efficiency: AWS Lambda will automatically spin up resources as they are needed, scale them on demand in response to increased traffic, and then spin them down when they’re no longer called. The downside is that when there is a bug or misconfiguration, costs can quickly compound if the function invokes unnecessarily or does not scale down appropriately. Performance can also be a problem if the highly-specified task of the function doesn’t perform correctly, and finding the root cause of the problem can be like finding a needle in a haystack for any developer or DevOps engineer.

Today, with Rookout’s new serverless debugging experience, DevOps teams can respond to an alert within their traditional monitoring or observability solution, and then drill into the problem at the code-level by setting a breakpoint within the Rookout UI. Users will see a timeline view of past invocations of the serverless functions, and will be able to choose the specific function they wish to debug so they can focus their efforts on relevant code areas.

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“Rookout accelerates developer velocity by reducing the time for bug resolution,” said Arnal Dayaratna, Research Vice President of Software Development at IDC, a premier global market intelligence firm. “Rookout enhances the operational agility of developers because they can collect data about applications on demand, from any environment, with a few clicks.”