node-inspector VS ndb

node-inspector (GitHub | NPM) lets you connect to a running app by running the node-debug command. This command will load Node Inspector in your default browser. Node Inspector supports Heap Profiling and can be useful for debugging memory leak issues.

Node-inspector lets you do some really cool things like live code changing, step debugging, scope injection and a bunch of other cool stuff. It’s bit involved to setup, so I’ll let you follow the instructions over at https://github.com/node-inspector/node-inspector

Using a debugger tool like ndb to step through code

If you need to access the Hardhat Runtime Environment from another tool which has its own CLI, like jest or ndb, you should write a script. Make sure to import the Hardhat runtime environment explicitly, so it can be run with that tool instead of Hardhat's CLI.

If we want to debug our tests we can use ndb.

Are you hitting a remote DB? Have you tried a different test runner (Jest can be hella slow)? Have you looked at https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/ndb or https://github.com/davidmarkclements/0x ?

ndb describes itself as "an improved debugging experience for Node.js, enabled by Chrome DevTools".