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by bariskaya 1391 days ago
Hello, HN! I'm Barış from Sidekick.

Sidekick is a live application debugger that lets you troubleshoot your applications while they keep on running. It allows you to add dynamic logs and put non-breaking breakpoints in your running application without the need of stopping & redeploying.

Currently supporting Java, Python & Node.js runtimes.

So Sidekick is like Chrome DevTools for your backend.

Problems that we solve

- Collecting dynamic data from running applications is hard

- Adding new logs and redeploying apps takes time ⌛

- Developer onboarding is hard for complex systems

- Microservices are harder to debug

- Logging everything or using APMs create so much unnecessary data

What we offer

Here is how you can benefit from Sidekick and boost your developer productivity up to 3x

- Debug your remote application (monoliths or microservices on Kubernetes, Docker, VMs, or Local) and collect actionable data from your remote application.

- Add logs to your production apps without redeploying or restarting

- Cut your monitoring costs with on-demand & conditional logpoints & tracepoints

- On-board new developers by showing how your apps work using real-time data.

- Observe Event-Driven Systems with ease

- Programmatically control where and when you collect data from your applications

- Either use Sidekick's Web IDE, VS Code & IntelliJ IDEA extensions to control your Sidekick Actions or use headless clients to bring Sidekick to your workflow in any way you want!

- Evaluate the impact of an error on applications with integrated distributed tracing.

- Collaborate with your colleagues by sharing snapshots taken by Sidekick.

- Reduce the time spent context-switching between different tools.

Our journey:

It has been around 6 months since we released Sidekick as a standalone solution and the last 6 months were a roller coaster. We have improved Sidekick to make it a true developer-first tool that makes the developers a part of the core loop. You can read my blog to learn more about our journey:

https://medium.com/runsidekick/past-present-and-future-of-si...

  In addition to our new features, we have decided to make Sidekick Open Source to allow self-hosting and make live debugging more accessible. Now it is ready to meet you! 
TLDR; Sidekick is a plus one for your observability stack, built for everyone who needs extra information from their running applications, and now it is open-source! We still have a lot to do and we would love to hear from you in the comments down below, your feedback and your recommendations
1 comments

In addition to being OSS, Do you mind sharing the differentiation or with overlap w Lightrun and Rookout?
Yeah sure you can check out: https://www.runsidekick.com/rookout-comparison & https://www.runsidekick.com/lightrun-comparison

We are currently updating these pages but we mainly differ with: Our headless approach (REST API & Node.js client), Lower Overhead & Higher Hit count limits, Web IDE, OSS, Thundra APM integration, Collaboration support, Full On-premise solution with Web IDE support

more will come with this months updates

This isn't a comparison just a title and misleading bullets. Lightrun supports all these things and so much more.

* Lightrun supports web UI via VSCode.dev support

* Lightrun can be installed on-prem

* It supports all these 3 platforms and .net soon

* It supports SSO and quite a few features required by fortune 100 companies

sorry for being misleading, I was not trying to do so. About the first one I was referring to our own web UI, considering the plugins you are right. 2. one they weren't used to ship with a 3rd party IDE afaik, that's why I've said full on-prem with web ui. don't remember saying anything about the 3rd and the 4th, and it wasn't supposed to be something offensive to our competitors
The site says:

> Sidekick vs Lightrun Why Choose Sidekick

Which implies the following bullet points are thing that sidekick has and Lightrun doesn't. Number 3 and 4 correspond to:

* Comprehensive language coverage (NodeJS, Java, Python)

All supported by Lightrun

* Enterprise features such as SSO, Workspace management, and more

Not sure what workspace management means but Lightrun supports a wide range of enterprise features and is deployed in Fortune 100 and major security conscious enterprises.