[HN Gopher] Show HN: Sidekick - Live application debugger is now...
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Show HN: Sidekick - Live application debugger is now open source
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. Sidekick Open Source
is here to allow self-hosting and make live debugging more
accessible. Built for everyone who needs extra information from
their running applications.
Author : sozal
Score : 66 points
Date : 2022-08-29 14:00 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| fuzzythinker wrote:
| Remove the finger image in the README. It's a huge turnoff.
| bariskaya wrote:
| sad to hear. created a pr for that
| [deleted]
| bariskaya wrote:
| Hello, HN! I'm Baris 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
| fillskills wrote:
| In addition to being OSS, Do you mind sharing the
| differentiation or with overlap w Lightrun and Rookout?
| bariskaya wrote:
| 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
| bariskaya wrote:
| also you can read our benchmark results:
| https://medium.com/runsidekick/sidekick-blog-production-
| debu...
| invalidname wrote:
| 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
| bariskaya wrote:
| 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
| invalidname wrote:
| 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.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Why would I use it over the JVM's stellar observability tools,
| that I assume can do a much better job due to being integral to
| it?
|
| I don't only mean the debugger, but also the flight recorder.
| sozal wrote:
| Hi,
|
| This is Serkan. Co-Founder&CTO at Thundra, the company behind
| Sidekick.
|
| Flight recorder is a very useful tool for profiling your apps
| running on JVM. But next generation debugging tools like
| Sidekick allows you to debug your Java applications without
| stopping at breakpoint (so it can be used even on production)
|
| Sidekick - gives you local debugging like experience with
| tracepoints (aka non-breaking breakpoints) - And allows you to
| inject logs dynamically to anywhere on the fly without code
| change, rebuild and redeploy
| kaba0 wrote:
| JFR can also run in production without any meaningful
| overhead, it is a very important goal of it.
|
| But dynamically changing new "trace"points with a running
| prod instance is indeed a new functionality it seems.
| [deleted]
| mdaniel wrote:
| > AGPL-3.0 license
|
| https://github.com/runsidekick/sidekick/blob/v0.0.1/LICENSE
|
| I knew what it was going to be before even looking
| [deleted]
| CSDude wrote:
| At least AGPL-3.0 is more honest and direct than SSPL or other
| vague licenses to prevent Amazon'd. Lawyers and internal legal
| departmens did not catch up to those licenses yet. Pretending
| to be open source until a point and forking under a new license
| leaves a bad taste.
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| > I knew what it was going to be before even looking
|
| Assuming that it's just the server part that's AGPL, that's not
| very restrictive for something that's purely a development
| tool.
|
| That's VERY different from a library you need to include in
| your finished application being AGPL or even server software
| that you might expose to end users being AGPL.
| bariskaya wrote:
| this article: https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-
| licenses#what-are-the-... helped us a lot on our decision.
|
| can you elaborate what is wrong with using a license that is
| listed on https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical ?
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| I think there is a knee jerk reaction against AGPL, because
| it can be seen as fairly restrictive in the case of software
| you would incorporate into your application, but it seems
| perfectly reasonable for a development tool.
| petercooper wrote:
| Just a guess, but I think a lot of people immediately see the
| letters "GPL" anywhere and back out, rightly or wrongly. The
| nuances of licenses are poorly understood by many developers
| (and even legal departments) and there's a "I can't be
| bothered" attitude a lot of the time, even where AGPL makes a
| lot of sense and isn't particularly restrictive on the
| average end user. There certainly needs to be a lot more
| education in this area.
| keithwinstein wrote:
| We hear this a ton from our friends at big companies,
| but... surely most of them use Linux? Or Git? Or x264,
| OpenJDK, GIMP, or VLC? Or (if you include LGPL) the WebCore
| portions of Chrome/Safari/Edge, which originated in
| KHTML/Konqueror? Or GTK, Cairo, ffmpeg, or WINE?
|
| It's a little hard to believe the "GPL" is _that_ much of a
| problem to the industry given how popular *GPL software
| remains in most places.
|
| GPLv3 I realize is a different story, but even then, the
| companies seem to find a way to hold their nose when they
| want to. (When we first released Mosh as GPL 3+, we got a
| call from Apple, who were unhappy that their employees were
| using Mosh to connect to servers because Apple apparently
| doesn't want employees to be installing any GPL v3 software
| on their company-owned Macs. On the phone call, I told them
| that (a) I didn't think they had anything to worry about in
| terms of actual problems from the GPLv3, and (b) if they
| really disagreed, we're open to the conversation, but it
| would cost them a lot of money for me to want to think
| about what it would take to give them Mosh under a
| different license. Somehow they ended up concluding that
| the GPLv3 wasn't that bad after all...)
| petercooper wrote:
| Most of the examples you cite are situations where the
| software is being used as a client or at a distance (in
| terms of being far down the stack) and not as part of a
| deliverable. I think using such software is considered
| straight forward by most (if not by paranoid corporate
| policies, such as those you've encountered).
|
| Where it gets more difficult is when potential
| dependencies are (A)GPL licensed. While I support the use
| of these licenses (particularly the AGPL for protecting
| cloud deployment of open source tools), I recognize the
| "friction" they can cause for certain classes of users
| who might just use something else to avoid thinking about
| it. (Which, you might say, is their loss.)
| dljsjr wrote:
| Personally I'm really happy to see a commercial entity with a
| FOSS offering that's protecting their revenue using AGPL
| instead of these new "open source eventually" business
| licenses. Don't get discouraged. For everyone that would
| complain about this license choice there are just as many of
| us who celebrate it.
| bariskaya wrote:
| Thanks for this comment! We wanted to make live debugging
| more accessible while protecting our revenue and AGPL
| seemed reasonable.
| mdaniel wrote:
| It's for sure not "wrong," as (a) it's your software (b)
| people have different concerns they want to have addressed by
| license terms
|
| For me, and the company I work for, AGPL is strictly banned.
| GPL is gravely frowned upon, because the founder had a lot of
| lawyers involved that almost bombed an acquisition. I
| appreciate that's anecdata, but for sure it is a
| "conversation" in the company versus Apache 2 which requires
| no conversation
|
| I'm actually kind of luke-warm about AGPL for some things,
| but for what I imagine is a JVM agent, and thus both injected
| into my software and communicates over the network, hard pass
|
| For clarity: I didn't mean my comment as a scolding: the
| community is almost certainty better off for you having
| chosen to share the code, and there will be folks who can and
| do contribute fixes under the terms of the AGPL. It's just
| been my overpowering experience that a lot of companies that
| try to open source code are trying to guard against "being
| Amazon-ed" and I appreciate why they think that way
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| > For me, and the company I work for, AGPL is strictly
| banned. GPL is gravely frowned upon, because the founder
| had a lot of lawyers involved that almost bombed an
| acquisition. I appreciate that's anecdata, but for sure it
| is a "conversation" in the company versus Apache 2 which
| requires no conversation
|
| This seems to be a development tool that does not need to
| be incorporated into your software (I'm assuming the
| library that runs in your software won't be AGPL but I
| could be wrong *), so it being AGPL should theoretically be
| strictly less restrictive than just being closed source.
|
| However, perhaps for companies with policies against (A)GPL
| software like yours it would be better if they offered it
| both as freeware under a closed source license that doesn't
| allow modifications AND open source under the AGPL so you
| could pick which license you like better?
|
| *Actually strictly speaking even if the agent software is
| AGPL I believe that would only really matter if you
| distributed a version of the software including the agent
| outside of your company, so theoretically you could just
| remove it for production releases, but I agree that it
| would be a lot more justified to avoid it because of the
| license in that case, so I hope they intend to release the
| agent software under a more permissive license.
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