Initial docs for Live Debugger tab in Datadog plugin for JetBrains IDEs

[jfree]

What does this PR do? What is the motivation?

Adds documentation for the Live Debugger feature that has been added to the upcoming release of the Datadog plugin for JetBrains IDEs.

Merge instructions

Please hold the merge until we have released the latest version of the plugin.

Merge readiness:

• Ready for merge

For Datadog employees:
Merge queue is enabled in this repo. Your branch name MUST follow the <name>/<description> convention and include the forward slash (/). Without this format, your pull request will not pass in CI, the GitLab pipeline will not run, and you won't get a branch preview. Getting a branch preview makes it easier for us to check any issues with your PR, such as broken links.

If your branch doesn't follow this format, rename it or create a new branch and PR.

To have your PR automatically merged after it receives the required reviews, add the following PR comment:

/merge

Additional notes

I've created a separate page for the Live Debugger documentation as it is likely to grow over time and the existing page for the Datadog plugin for JetBrains is already quite long. It would make sense also to move the Continuous Profiler docs to a separate page, but that can be done in a later PR.

[github-actions]

Preview links (active after the build_preview check completes)

New or renamed files

• https://docs-staging.datadoghq.com/david.gilbert/IDE-4301-live-debug/developers/ide_plugins/idea/live_debugger

Modified Files

• https://docs-staging.datadoghq.com/david.gilbert/IDE-4301-live-debug/developers/ide_plugins/idea/

[joepeeples]

@jfree I pushed two commits to update the draft:

• 29cb3c2 - Adds the new Live Debugger page to the left navigation menu. This relocates the page at the same level as the main IDE pages, because the nav typically only allows 2 nesting levels. Also if we eventually add the Live Debugger to other IDEs in the future, it'd be better to have the page in a neutral spot instead of under a specific IDE.

  I also added a product identifier tag at the top to help link it to the JetBrains IDEs page.

  

• 596108c - Applies various line edits and small revisions to match our style guidelines. The commit diff makes it pretty clear to see what I changed; we can keep revising anything needs to be reverted, etc.

  This also crops the images to remove drop shadows and white space, again to match our typical style for images.

Assuming these updates look good to you, the PR should be ready to merge with a /merge comment. Thanks for preparing this content!

[jfree]

29cb3c2 - Adds the new Live Debugger page to the left navigation menu. This relocates the page at the same level as the main IDE pages, because the nav typically only allows 2 nesting levels. Also if we eventually add the Live Debugger to other IDEs in the future, it'd be better to have the page in a neutral spot instead of under a specific IDE.

I'm not sure that this will work well. While it is our goal to have feature parity across the IDEs, the implementations look very different between the JetBrains IDEs and the VS Code extension. The majority of developers use one or the other IDE but not both, so I think it makes sense for us to take on some duplication with the docs and provide IDE-specific versions for the features. That way we can use IDE-specific language ("action" vs "command" for example) to describe features, plus IDE-specific screenshots, and not require the user to navigate some generic descriptions to understand how the feature works in their specific IDE. So this is why, at least for now, we've prepared the docs "per IDE".

596108c - Applies various line edits and small revisions to match our style guidelines.

These changes are great, thanks!

[joepeeples]

This diff shows my latest changes, relocating the Live Debugger page nested under JetBrains:

Adding a 4th-level nav page requires an override in the Docs system code, so now the PR will need approval from the Websites team; once I know the PR passes CI, I'll follow up with them to get that review.

[jfree]

/merge

[dd-devflow]

View all feedbacks in Devflow UI.

2025-04-30 16:21:27 UTC ℹ️ Start processing command /merge

---

2025-04-30 16:21:32 UTC ℹ️ MergeQueue: pull request added to the queue

The expected merge time in master is approximately 20m (p90).

---

2025-04-30 16:37:29 UTC ℹ️ MergeQueue: This merge request was merged