Israeli debugging tools provider Rookout Inc. is hoping to get a bit more traction after raising $8 million in a new round of funding.

Announced today, the Series A round was led by Cisco Investments along with existing investors TLV Partners and Emerge. Also participating in the round were GitHub Inc. Chief Executive Nat Friedman, LaunchDarkly Chief Technology Officer John Kodumal and Raymond Colletti, vice president of revenue at Codecov LLC.

Rookout came to attention last year with the launch of its application code monitoring tools for Amazon Web Services Inc.’s serverless computing platform Amazon Lambda, which allows software developers to run code in the cloud without worrying about managing the underlying infrastructure.

Rookout’s tools help developers to debug their serverless apps in a matter of seconds. Its software works on live code as it runs production, allowing developers to pinpoint problems with a single click. Developers simply identify the piece of code they wish to check for problems, and Rookout will provide a full-stack trace that displays any issues via a friendly user interface. The tool works on live code without stopping or changing anything in the development environment.

That saves developers from lots of headaches, because previously the only way to debug serverless apps was to create a test environment that simulates the various third-party application programming interfaces and devices an app is communicating with. That was not just painstaking but also involved lots of guesswork and trial and error.

The company reckons that customers using its debugging software can reduce the time it takes to find and fix bugs from hours to just a few seconds, the obvious advantage being that it gives developers more time to focus on designing new features for their apps.

Since last year’s launch, Rookout has extended its platform from serverless apps to cover applications built using Kubernetes, which is an orchestration tool used to manage large deployments of software containers, a method of running applications across different computing environments unchanged.

Although software debugging remains its primary focus, Rookout has in recent months tried to position itself as a “data extraction and pipelining” provider, because the insights its platform derives can be used for more than just fixing problems with code.

“At first, we focused on Rookout’s easiest-to-understand use case: debugging,” Or Weis, Rookout’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. “In the last year, we’ve discovered that our customers are finding completely new ways to use Rookout’s code-level data collection capabilities and that we need to accommodate, support and enhance the many varied uses of code-level observability and pipelining.”

These “new ways” include things such as dynamic alerting and monitoring, Weis told SiliconANGLE. “By combining Rookout’s dynamic nature, its pinpointing of services and flows, and its ability to drive data into any platform, developers can use Rookout to create alerts on-demand targeting specific errors, usage patterns, specific user sessions etc on-the-fly, and then view them in their interface of choice, such as Slack, Sumo Logic, Datadog or Pagerduty,” Weis said.

Another use case relates to developer training and onboarding. According to Weis, Rookout’s customers have found that developers can learn much more quickly when they’re able to observe code as it’s running in production. In addition, Rookout’s capabilities can also be used to provide general data analytics for users beyond software developers.

“It’s not only developers who need data from code, but product, marketing, sales teams and the like,” Weis said. “Developers using Rookout save coding time by collecting data for their colleagues, or by providing them with direct access to Rookout, to get the data points on their own.”

Armed with its new funding, Rookout now wants to extend its tools to cover more programming languages. Its software currently supports JVM-based languages such as Java and Kotlin, as well as NodeJS and Python. The company is also announcing the launch of a new, free version of its tools to try to get more developers on board. The free versions provides fewer features, but the company said it hopes it will be enough to entice more users to pay for the premium version of its platform.

Image: Rookout/Facebook