HyperTest is now Hyperprobe

From HyperTest to HyperProbe: Why We Rebuilt from Scratch

Three years ago, we started HyperTest with a simple belief: if you could see exactly what your production traffic looked like, you could catch bugs before they reached users.

The idea was sound. The execution taught us everything.

What HyperTest Did

HyperTest was a testing automation platform built for backend engineering teams. The core insight was that the most reliable tests are not the ones engineers write by hand — they are the ones derived from real production traffic. Instead of asking developers to imagine edge cases, HyperTest captured actual API calls flowing through live services and converted them into integration tests automatically.

The first version of the product focused on a technique called diff testing. It would replay production traffic against a new version of a service and compare the responses. If the new version returned something different, HyperTest flagged it. No test scripts required. No manual maintenance. Just a continuous, automated check that your latest code behaved the same way production did yesterday.

It worked well in controlled environments. But it ran into a wall in the real world.

The problem was adoption. Getting diff testing into a team's workflow required DevOps buy-in, infrastructure changes, and a shared understanding of what "different" meant in the context of their specific services. Some responses were supposed to change. Others were not. Teaching a tool to know the difference, across hundreds of services and dozens of teams, turned out to be a harder problem than the testing itself.

We iterated. The second version of HyperTest moved from diff testing to a different approach: capturing production traffic via OpenTelemetry and converting it into integration tests that lived in the codebase like any other test. Developers could run them locally. CI pipelines could run them automatically. The tests were real, reproducible, and derived from actual usage.

This version found customers. Engineers liked the idea. But another adoption wall appeared: developers avoided integration tests. QA teams wanted end-to-end tests. The product sat in a no-man's land between two audiences, neither of whom fully owned it.

We had built something genuinely useful, but not something irreplaceable.

What Changed

The pivot did not come from a whiteboard session. It came from watching how engineering teams actually spent their time when production broke.

The pattern was consistent across every customer conversation. An incident would fire. Engineers would open their observability dashboards — Datadog, New Relic, whatever they had — and start hunting through logs and traces for the root cause. Sometimes the answer was there. Often it was not. The log line they needed had never been written. The variable they needed to inspect had never been captured. The service had failed silently, in a way that left no trace in the tools built to observe it.

The real problem was not testing. It was debugging. Specifically, debugging the class of failures that existing tools cannot explain: silent failures, race conditions, state divergence between services, bugs that throw no exceptions and leave no footprints in logs.

What HyperProbe Does

HyperProbe is a live production debugger. It lets developers place non-breaking probes on running services directly from their IDE, without redeploying, without restarting, and without touching a single line of application code.

When a probe fires, it captures the exact in-memory state of that request at the moment of failure: the raw payload, the parsed object, the variable values, the database write, the call stack. Everything a developer would see if they had a debugger attached to production — which, until now, they could not.

The result is root cause identification in minutes, not hours. Not because HyperProbe guesses better than logs. Because it sees what logs were never designed to show.

Three years of HyperTest taught us what engineers actually need when production breaks. HyperProbe is the answer we wish we had built first.