Overview
The Live Debugger enables you to add logpoints—auto-expiring, non-breaking breakpoints—to your runtime code to collect information for debugging. The logpoints are added dynamically, so there is no need to redeploy your code, allowing you to resolve issues in a running system. You can edit or delete logpoints at any time, and they automatically expire after 60 minutes.
Live Debugger tab
The Live Debugger in the Datadog tool window shows the defined logpoints and their related output:
The tree on the left shows all logpoints created by the current user. Select a logpoint to display its status and the log messages emitted during the past 24 hours. At the top-right of the panel, View logs in Datadog opens the Log Explorer in Datadog to show log events for the selected logpoint.
To navigate to the source code location for a logpoint, right-click and select Jump to Source.
Source editor
In the source editor, an icon is shown in the gutter for any line that has a logpoint defined:
Click the icon to open the Datadog tool window and show the selected logpoint. Right-click the icon for options to enable, disable, edit, and delete the logpoint. These actions are described in later sections.
Managing logpoints
Add a logpoint
To add a logpoint, right-click on a line of code in the source editor and select Add a Log to a Live Service. A dialog appears where you can enter the service name, the environment, the log message you would like to have emitted at runtime, and an optional logpoint condition expression:
The log message field accepts a log template that contains descriptive text and variable references—see the Dynamic Instrumentation expression language documentation for details. The log message is generated using the runtime state immediately prior to the line of code being executed. If a condition is defined, log events are generated only when the condition evaluates to true.
Logpoints expire automatically after 60 minutes.
Local and remote versions
Notice that the remote code may be a different version compared to the source code in the IDE. The New Logpoint dialog displays the version of the code that is deployed remotely, if possible, so that you can see exactly where the logpoint is being placed. This requires that your application or service is tagged with Git information.
Tip: Checking out this revision locally shows you the same code in your IDE that is running remotely, which simplifies the live debugging experience. However, this is not required as the Datadog plugin maps local line numbers for logpoints to remote line numbers based on Git commit information.
Edit a logpoint
To modify the log message for a logpoint, right-click the logpoint and select Edit:
You can update the log message and the (optional) logpoint condition. Changing the service or environment requires deleting the logpoint and creating a new one.
Note: Applying changes to the logpoint also extends the expiration time to 60 minutes.
Delete a logpoint
You can delete logpoints by right-clicking the icon in the gutter of the source editor, or the entry in the tool window, and selecting Delete from the context menu.
Enable and disable a logpoint
You can enable or disable logpoints by right-clicking and selecting the appropriate context menu item. The icon changes to indicate the current state of the logpoint:
| Icon | Description |
|---|
| Active: Log events will be generated when the line of code is about to be executed. |
| Disabled: The logpoint is inactive, either because it automatically expired or the user disabled it manually. |
| Error: The logpoint is not generating log events due to an error. |
| Warning: The logpoint may not be generating log events. |
Disabling then re-enabling a logpoint extends its expiry time to 60 minutes.
Prerequisites
The Live Debugger feature supports Java and Python and is subject to the same setup requirements as Dynamic Instrumentation.
Further reading
Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:
