Rookout

Rookout was established in 2017 by Or Weis and Liran Haimovitch to address the complexities of debugging in cloud-native environments. The founders, who have extensive backgrounds in software development and cybersecurity, including service in the Israeli Defense Forces' elite Unit 8200, identified a critical need for better code transparency. Haimovitch, with his experience as a cybersecurity software engineer, and Weis, a serial entrepreneur with a history of lead engineering roles, aimed to create a developer-first tool to simplify the debugging process. In July 2023, the software intelligence company Dynatrace announced it was acquiring Rookout.

The company provides a developer-first observability platform that allows software engineers to troubleshoot and debug code while it is actively running in production environments. This is accomplished through a feature called "non-breaking breakpoints," which lets developers collect real-time data from live code without halting the application, restarting it, or redeploying code. This capability is particularly valuable for complex, modern architectures such as Kubernetes, microservices, and serverless applications. Rookout's platform is designed to give developers deep, code-level insights and data, including stack traces, variables, and tracing information, directly from the running application. The service caters to a range of clients from small businesses and startups to large enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies. Revenue is generated through a subscription-based model.

Rookout's core service is a live debugging and data collection platform that integrates with a variety of development workflows and environments. It supports multiple programming languages such as Java, .NET, Python, Node.js, and Go, and can be deployed across on-premise, cloud, and hybrid-cloud infrastructures. The platform provides dynamic instrumentation, allowing developers to insert data-collection points into code on-demand. This helps significantly reduce the time spent on debugging, which in turn accelerates development cycles and improves software quality. By offering detailed visibility into application behavior in production, Rookout helps bridge the gap between development and operations, enhancing collaboration between teams. The company's technology is designed to be privacy-aware, offering features like data redaction to ensure security and compliance.

Keywords: developer-first observability, production debugging, live debugging, code-level data, dynamic instrumentation, non-breaking breakpoints, cloud-native applications, Kubernetes debugging, serverless debugging, microservices, software troubleshooting, application monitoring, real-time data collection, developer tools, code diagnostics, observability platform, DevOps, application performance, bug resolution, software quality