Open Stack

Are there any tools that people can recommend for live debugging of 
openstack services?

I'm looking for a mechanism where I could take a running system that 
isn't behaving the way I expect and somehow poke around inside the 
program while it keeps running.  (Sort of like tracepoints in gdb.)

I've seen mention of things like twisted.manhole and 
eventlet.backdoor...has anyone used this sort of thing with openstack? 
Are there better options?

Also, has anyone ever seen an implementation of watchpoints for python? 
  By that I mean the ability to set a breakpoint if the value of a 
variable changes.  I found 
"https://sourceforge.net/blog/watchpoints-in-python/" but it looks 
pretty hacky.

Thanks,
Chris