February 7, 2025

Lightstep Overview

Lightstep

Lightstep

Introduction

Lightstep platform provides one of the simplest ways for developers and Site Reliability Engineers, SREs, to monitor and respond to changes in cloud-native applications.The company collects and analyzes data across infrastructure, application, runtime, cloud and other third-party services. It correlates root causes across traces, metrics, and logs anywhere in the system, and provide immediate insights for developers and Site Reliability Engineers. Powered by cutting-edge distributed tracing and a revolutionary metrics database, Lightstep’s Change Intelligence, created by the team behind Google’s observability program, provides actionable insights to help its users identify the causes of specific cloud-related changes. It provides the tools required for reliability and observability managers to lessen the effects of outages, improve software performance, and establish org-wide standards that will in turn promote adoption and automation.

It provides an excellent incident response management platform that provides a clear view of the activities that need to be completed right away. Lightstep includes a number of service connectors that enable users to increase observability and track their instances on cloud platforms. Additionally, individuals or teams can utilize its pre-built monitoring connectors.

LightStep aims to boost confidence in those who develop, employ, and rely on today’s powerful software applications. It does this by guiding people through the scale and complexity of today’s software and helps organizations keep control over their systems. It has its headquarters in San Francisco, California, and is funded by Redpoint and Sequoia.

History

Lightstep is a vast type of software including health monitoring software and change-response tools for cloud applications. The company was founded in 2015. Investors in the business include Cowboy Ventures, Redpoint, Altimeter Capital, and many others.

Notable faces in the company includes the prestigious Daniel “Spoons” Spoonhower and current CEO Ben Sigelman. They are the cofounders of the company. Both individuals gained some notoriety while they worked at Google before establishing their company. In order to assist all developers in creating better, more scalable programs, they quit Google and founded LightStep. Unlike other companies which usually have bumpy beginnings, the subsequent years of LightStep were rather smooth.

In an episode of DevOps Chats, Spoons discussed what they were up to and the direction he thought things would be headed.

Products

The company has embarked on a lot of projects and manufactured a lot of products but in this article, we’ll shed light on the first product manufactured by the company. LightStep [x]PM, the company’s first product, is the first performance management solution to apply APM’s core value proposition, monitoring and troubleshooting performance issues — across all components of today’s software applications.

It was officially introduced at Structure 2017 and it allows enterprises to quickly identify bottlenecks and address incidents by providing an accurate, thorough view of the entire complicated software system at any given time. Using a distinctive, decentralized architecture that continuously monitors 100% of transactions across all services, in production, LightStep [x]PM helped to address the issue at hand and offered solution to it. It allowed and still allows customers to measure performance across all points where it affects their business, including specific microservices, significant mobile transitions, important customer accounts, and individual end users. The statistical engine of LightStep [x]PM replays and records a thorough end-to-end trace if an anomaly is found. The cross-service context offered by this trace is necessary to address an incident or pinpoint a performance issue.

Acquisitions

ServiceNow announced the acquisition of the Lightstep platform in mid-May 2021 in order to enhance DevOps engineers’ ability to monitor cloud applications. The company, which was in expectance to finalize the acquisition in the second quarter of 2021,  eventually finalized the deal. At the time, even after the acquisition, the financial details of the deal were not made public till a few weeks later. ServiceNow, ever since, has taken advantage of Lightstep’s capabilities to enhance its IT operations offerings. With Lightstep, the company should be able to provide customers with a way to monitor the performance of applications with the goal of detecting problems before they grow into major issues that take down a website or application.

Additionally, ServiceNow plans to transform how software solutions are delivered to customers. This will ultimately make it easier for customers to innovate quickly.

LightStep utilizes an “observability” strategy.The “observability” idea used by Lightstep entails taking raw log data produced by clients and servers and turning it into useful information. According to Ben Siegelman, co-founder and CEO of Lightstep, “observability” now primarily serves DevOps teams that develop and manage important applications. In his words, “We have always thought that the usefulness of surveillance should apply to the entire company”.

Customers of Lightstep include Spotify, GitHub, and Twilio. Each of these businesses relies on cloud-based applications that must be very reliable and scalable for large-scale data transmission. Engineers and DevOps have access to an early warning system through Lightstep that enables them to monitor critical signals and software health indicators. As part of the acquisition deal, this early warning system also directly integrates with the ServiceNow platform. The system approach to surveillance used by Lightstep in conjunction with ServiceNow’s enterprise-wide automation immediately fixes the issues found and stop the emergence of a series of failures. ServiceNow alters how software solutions are provided to clients with the aid of Lightstep, according to Pablo Stern, senior vice president of products at the company. “Customers will ultimately find it simpler to develop swiftly as a result of this. They will be confident to usher in a new era of workflow organization because they will be able to create and use their software more quickly than ever before”.

Why Choose Lightstep?

  • Top-notch architecture: The time series database architecture utilized by lightstep was built by the team that launched Monarch and Dapper, Google’s planet-scale metrics and tracing. With a common storage and serving system for all telemetry, the company enables customer app reliability on billions of devices regardless of spikes in traffic or usage.
  • Unified Telemetry: Lightstep is the only platform that natively, naturally, and scalably combines metrics and tracing. Query and investigate issues without knowing ahead of time which data type contains the answers you need and automatically correlate root causes across traces, metrics, and logs anywhere in the system.
  • Good and affordable pricing:  For every 100 containers, hosts, or users added to Lightstep, the cost increases by… nothing! The pricing is based on services, which means more developers, SREs, operators, sales people (ok, not them) can deliver on their goals without additional spend.
  • Visibility and response: Move seamlessly from high-level service maps to specific signals contributing to issues in production and optimize on-call with automated, rapid response workflows.

Conclusion

Lightstep uses an application for IT monitoring in the cloud and a microservices design. It provides a framework for monitoring software built using a microservices architecture. Based on the Open Tracing standard, it readily tracks different application processes and flags the sluggish and unsuccessful ones, enabling users to perform root cause investigation. This is accomplished by tracking the requests that move across microservices, analyzing them, and notifying users when a specific, pre-configured SLA is not operating as intended. LightStep’s ranks 4th among 272 active competitors across the globe which include Honeycomb, AppDynamics, AppNeta, Sentry.

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