Today at QCon London 2019, LightStep, the leading provider of performance monitoring software for organizations adopting microservices and serverless, unveiled LightStep Tracing. LightStep Tracing is the fastest way for developers and DevOps to adopt best-of-breed distributed tracing, a technique used to dramatically improve the performance and reliability of modern distributed architectures, like microservices and serverless. LightStep Tracing is both easier to integrate and more powerful than any other distributed tracing solution, and it is now generally available as a public beta.

The technology industry now recognizes distributed tracing as a hard requirement for any migration to microservices or serverless. However, until now, distributed tracing has been challenging to deploy and cumbersome to use for enterprise applications. LightStep Tracing changes all of that: it delivers the sophisticated analytical capabilities of LightStep’s powerful [x]PM performance monitoring product in a package designed to accelerate tracing adoption across an engineering organization.

Google was the first to deploy basic distributed tracing in production. That project, called Dapper, analyzes more than 2 billion transactions per second, helping Google’s developers make sense of their large-scale distributed systems. Dapper was built by Ben Sigelman, LightStep’s co-founder and CEO, who went on to co-create the OpenTracing API standard, part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Sigelman said: “LightStep Tracing is much more than a way to search and visualize distributed traces: with access to 100% of the unsampled data, unlimited cardinality, automatic pattern detection, mobile and web support, and OpenTracing-native instrumentation, it redraws the lines around APM and observability. We are excited about the value this new best-of-breed offering will bring to teams adopting distributed tracing.”

LightStep Tracing incorporates innovations previously found only in LightStep [x]PM, but in a package that’s right-sized for individual teams within the enterprise. LightStep [x]PM serves market-leading customers including Lyft, Twilio, Github, Airtable, BigCommerce, Medium, Segment, Zalando, and many others.

LightStep Tracing Features:

  • LightStep Tracing is a pure SaaS solution without any infrastructure burdens for developers. Data is safe and secure.
  • LightStep Tracing leverages the same high-performance architecture as LightStep [x]PM which enables it to collect 100% of the performance data. This translates into unlimited cardinality and real-time indexing and search, so teams never miss a performance outlier and reduce mean time to incident resolution.
  • Dynamic system diagrams that visually summarize the bottlenecks affecting any aspect of a microservices architecture.
  • Real-time performance histograms enable organizations to understand what’s normal and what’s not, all with an unprecedented level of analytical detail.
  • “Snapshots”: Durable, shareable snapshots of system behavior that explain performance anomalies via statistical summaries of thousands of relevant traces. Snapshots are an industry first, providing an unprecedented level of detail and analytical depth, even for events in the past.
  • Works with Go, Java, Objective C, C#, .NET, JavaScript, five other languages, all major mobile operating systems, cloud providers, plus microservice, serverless and IOT platforms.
  • Native integration into leading service mesh technologies including Envoy and Istio.
  • LightStep Tracing provides developers with step-by-step instructions and validations along the way, both guiding and accelerating instrumentation and tracing adoption.
  • LightStep Tracing visualizes service-to-service interactions to provide a deeper understanding of complex system behavior spanning web, mobile, microservices, serverless, and monoliths.
  • With an easy to use interface, streamlined instrumentation based on OpenTracing, individuals and teams can get up and running with distributed tracing in minutes. With no lock-in to a bloated platform, LightStep Tracing makes best-of-breed, unsampled distributed tracing available for everyone.