Lightstep

Lightstep is an observability platform, now part of ServiceNow, that provides distributed tracing, metrics monitoring, and change intelligence capabilities for engineering teams building and operating cloud-native microservice architectures. Founded by engineers who built distributed systems monitoring at Google, Lightstep brings deep expertise in large-scale observability to production environments.

The distributed tracing capabilities of Lightstep are the foundation of the platform. By collecting and analyzing traces from all services in a distributed system, Lightstep provides visibility into the full path of every request as it flows through multiple services, queues, and databases. The trace analysis tools help engineers understand service dependencies, identify latency bottlenecks, and correlate performance issues across service boundaries.

Lightstep's Change Intelligence feature is designed to accelerate mean time to resolution (MTTR) during incidents by automatically correlating performance changes with deployment and configuration changes. When a service's error rate or latency increases, Change Intelligence identifies recent changes to the service or its dependencies that correlate with the degradation, surfacing likely root causes immediately rather than requiring manual investigation.

The Unified Query interface in Lightstep allows querying across metrics, traces, and logs in a single interface, using a consistent model that enables correlating signals from different telemetry types. The ability to pivot from a metrics anomaly to the traces that exhibit the anomaly, and from those traces to the associated logs, is fundamental to efficient incident investigation in complex systems.

Service health dashboards in Lightstep provide pre-built and custom views of service-level indicators including error rates, latency percentiles, throughput, and apdex scores. These dashboards help engineering teams maintain awareness of service health and detect regressions quickly after deployments.

OpenTelemetry is the preferred instrumentation standard for Lightstep. The platform provides OpenTelemetry launchers that simplify the configuration and initialization of OpenTelemetry SDKs in popular languages and frameworks, reducing the effort required to instrument applications correctly.

As part of ServiceNow's IT Operations Management (ITOM) portfolio, Lightstep benefits from integration with ServiceNow's broader platform for IT service management, change management, and workflow automation.