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Tag: LightStep

  • Lightstep Unveils New Observability Platform to Replace Conventional Monitoring Solutions

    Built on top of rich distributed tracing data, metrics, and logs, the platform provides a unified view of telemetry data making it the quickest way to know what’s changed in system and service health

     

    SAN FRANCISCO, April 2, 2020 — Lightstep, the leading provider of observability software for organizations adopting microservices and serverless, today announced the release of its best-in-class observability solution to help developers better understand the health of systems and services. This includes integrating new metrics capabilities into their platform, enabling developers to have a one-stop shop for all their observability needs. New analysis features provide developers with the fastest and most effective way to investigate errors, understand service health issues, and predict the impact of new deployments.   

     

    As companies’ reliance on performant and reliable software increases, developers are facing the brunt of the burden. Every second of downtime can be detrimental to an organization’s bottom line, and the need for developers to adopt tools that can mitigate these lapses is greater than ever. 

     

    The next evolution of Lightstep’s distributed tracing tool is an observability platform that  provides automatic and rich analysis. Lightstep’s powerful capabilities help developers develop, deploy, and debug new service releases, regardless of the deployment methodology used (for example, canaries, blue/green deploys). Developers will then be able to identify and resolve the cause of performance degradations faster than any other tool on the market. The error and latency analysis feature simplifies the investigation of a service’s errors and latency by quickly highlighting the source of the problem and how it propagates through the call stack. It also helps developers understand what may have caused the error with a list of data-driven hypotheses. 

     

    And with new capabilities around runtime metrics, the solution accurately correlates metrics with problems in service performance. By making runtime metrics accessible with zero additional configuration and providing side-by-side visibility of performance metrics, developers are able to quickly identify if problems in their runtime (e.g. increased garbage collection, CPU, or memory) are causing service degradations.

     

    “At our core, Lightstep is a company of developers, so we know first-hand the stress placed on DevOps teams to execute seamless deployments every time, and how it is only continuing to grow as tech stacks get more complex,” said Daniel Spoonhower, CTO, Lightstep. “With our new observability solution, developers can analyze errors in real time, at any point in the deployment, and have all the tools and data they need in one unified view – that integrate effortlessly into their existing workflows.”

     

     

    With current market offerings, data that developers need quick access to is fragmented across many tools, making it difficult to swiftly understand what has changed in the performance of their services. Lightstep’s platform gives users a single place to answer real observability problems in real-time. These new updates include: 

     

     

    • Minimize the guessing: see insights based on metrics, traces, and logs all in one place, and at the right time
    • Regression analysis: automatically see what is contributing the most to your errors, latency, and throughput
    • Deployment monitoring: automatically see how different versions of your service are performing, and quickly diagnose regressions
    • Seamless onboarding: guided onboarding across almost any language in order to enable immediate insights

     

     

    “The Service Health feature, with regression analysis built-in, is exactly how I, as a performance engineer, would approach a regression. Out of the box, we can pinpoint not only when and where a regression first occurred, but also what caused the regression. All we had to do was show Service Health to the service owner for them to understand performance, distilled into three simple charts on a single tab. Unbeatable,” said Ian Thompson, Senior Software Engineer, Skyscanner.

     

    About Lightstep

    Lightstep enables teams to detect and resolve regressions quickly, regardless of system scale or complexity. We integrate seamlessly into daily workflows, whether you are proactively optimizing performance or investigating a root cause so you can quickly get back to building features.

  • OpenTelemetry Announces First Wave of Beta Releases for Java, Go, JavaScript, Python, and .Net Components

    SAN FRANCISCO—OpenTelemetry, an open source project created to provide a complete toolkit for cloud-native software observability, today announced the beta release of the first wave of supported languages, – including Java, JavaScript, Python, Go, and .Net – as well as the OpenTelemetry Collector.

    “To address the challenges around performance and root cause analysis introduced by emerging technologies like microservices, we teamed up with experts in telemetry to standardize observability – making it much more accessible for development teams working in complex environments.”

    By integrating tracing and metrics into a single system, OpenTelemetry provides a framework for building next generation observability platforms. OpenTelemetry simplifies the instrumentation of cloud-native software. Rich correlations between tracing and metrics help developers effectively conduct root cause analysis in distributed systems.

    By qualifying for the beta launch, each component meets the following requirements:

    • The implementation of all features contained in the OpenTelemetry Specification, v0.3 or higher. This includes implementation of all API features, including traces, metrics, context propagation, and semantic conventions.
    • Support for exporting to OTLP, Jaeger, and Prometheus.
    • Instrumentation for at least one HTTP, gRPC, SQL, and web framework per language.
    • API, SDK, and getting started documentation.
    • Implementation of OTLP (an OpenTelemetry-native data format) in the OpenTelemetry Collector.

    “At LightStep, we conducted research that found that 91 percent of developers are using or plan to use microservices, and almost all developers reported challenges in using microservices,” said Ben Sigelman, a member of the governance committee of OpenTelemetry and CEO of LightStep. “To address the challenges around performance and root cause analysis introduced by emerging technologies like microservices, we teamed up with experts in telemetry to standardize observability – making it much more accessible for development teams working in complex environments.”

    “We’ve made significant progress on OpenTelemetry in the last few weeks as we’ve successfully added more languages for inclusion in the beta launch. We’ll continue to add more language-specific components to the project as we move forward, bringing us closer to our mission of instrumenting the world,” said Morgan McLean, co-founder of OpenCensus and OpenTelemetry and product manager at Google.

    About OpenTelemetry

    A CNCF Sandbox member, OpenTelemetry is an open source project that aims to make observability more accessible for all. Formed through the merger of Google’s OpenCensus and the CNCF’s OpenTracing, the project is currently comprised of 82 companies, including LightStep, Google, Microsoft, Splunk, Postmates, and Uber. For more information, please visit opentelemetry.io.

     

    About LightStep

    LightStep’s mission is to deliver confidence at scale for those who develop, operate and rely on today’s powerful software applications. Its products leverage distributed tracing technology – initially developed by a LightStep co-founder at Google – to offer best-of-breed observability to organizations adopting microservices or serverless at scale. LightStep is backed by Redpoint, Sequoia, Altimeter Capital, Cowboy Ventures, and Harrison Metal and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. For more information, visit https://lightstep.com or follow @LightStepHQ.

     

     

  • LightStep Unveils APM for Microservices

    LightStep Unveils APM for Microservices

    Various forms of application performance management (APM) platforms have been around for some time. But with the rise of microservices many IT organizations are discovering that legacy APM platforms were not designed to handle the volume of software modules or the rate at which those modules are updated. But LightStep, a startup founded by former Google employees and flush with an additional $29 million in funding, is positioning itself as the first APM written from the ground up for microservices environments.

    LightStep CEO Ben Sigelman says regardless of where software modules and components get deployed, LightStep [x]PM is capable of monitoring and troubleshooting performance issues across all web and mobile clients, monoliths and microservices.

    Most of the demand for LightStep [x]PM, he says, is being driven primarily by microservices based on containers such as Docker. But the APM platform itself can support both microservices and legacy monolithic applications. That creates an opportunity to rationalize APM platforms as organizations make the shift to microservices while continuing to need to support existing legacy applications running in a production environment, Sigelman says.

    Twilio, Lyft, Yext, GitHub and DigitalOcean are already using LightStep [x]PM, which traces its roots back to Dapper, an always-on distributed tracing system that Sigelman developed at Google in production environments. A decentralized architecture enables LightStep [x]PM to continuously analyze 100 percent of transactions across all services. A statistical engine is then employed to detect anomalies, which the APM can then record and replay as part of an end-to-end tracing capability based on OpenTracing, an open API standard co-created by Sigelman and others that has now become a project administered by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

    Other capabilities embedded within LightStep [x]PM include support for service mesh and load-balancing technologies such as Envoy, linkerd, nginx and haproxy.

    With every new era of enterprise computing, a contest occurs between startup companies such as LightStep and incumbent providers of technology platforms. LightStep is clearly trying to fill a void before incumbent providers of APM platforms can add support for microservices. Incumbents occasionally rely on their own organic efforts to upgrade their platforms, but more often they buy a startup company and then spend several years trying to unify disparate code bases.

    Of course, there are many organizations that are just beginning their DevOps journey. Many of the them may not have any kind of APM platform in place. Most tend to be cost-sensitive as well, so offerings based on open-source code tend to have greater appeal.

    However the APM wars play out, it’s apparent they are about to enter a new phase. The winners and losers of those wars will be determined by DevOps teams rather than C-level IT executives trying to impose a framework from on high. After all, if IT organizations have learned anything in the last few years, it’s that DevOps tends to have a more lasting impact when it comes from the bottom up.

    — Mike Vizard