Announcing Unified Alerts

When an alert goes off, it can trigger some of the more stressful moments of being an on-call engineerstressful moments of being an on-call engineer. That stress can be compounded by the scale of the alert, the relative newness to the role, or the level of visibility that management has into the issue. When an alert triggers, you want to be able to quickly move from triaging the alert to begin investigating, mitigating, and resolving the issue. An actionable alert enables you to move through this process quicker.

Introducing Unified Alerting

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Lightstep’s Unified Alerting capabilities across metrics and tracing, making it easier and more flexible to configure and triage alerts - simplifying and streamlining one of the most important parts of your observability journey. Lightstep’s alerting capabilities have enabled organizations to detect issues before they become problemsdetect issues before they become problems, and have even been used to enable more sophisticated alerting techniques such as adaptive pagingadaptive paging.

Today’s announcement makes it even easier for everyone from novices to experts to configure alerts on the most critical parts of their application. We are also introducing new thresholds, and aggregations across our alerts.

Actionable Alerts

Our biggest change comes in the form of one-click investigation. In June, we announced major changes to our Change IntelligenceChange Intelligence feature-set, and we’re excited to announce that we have incorporated those latest changes into our alerting capabilities.

Not only will this decrease the amount of time it takes to investigate > mitigate > resolve issues, but it will enable more junior engineers, on-call teams, or anyone else, to quickly resolve an issue without relying on tribal knowledge.

Observability-as-code

We’ve talked about the concept of Observability-Landscape-as-CodeObservability-Landscape-as-Code before, but one of the cooler features of our latest announcement more closely aligns with the concept of Observability-as-Code (OaC). OaC isn't just about instrumentation or queries, but managing the end-to-end pipeline of instrumentation, to definition, to management of outputs. With this latest announcement, you can now manage all of your alerting, including snoozing alerts, via our public API. For organizations that heavily rely on APIs to get things done, this change will allow engineers to continue working at a pace they’re used to without having to disconnect and manage alerting via an interface.

Alerting shouldn’t be stressful

That buzz or ding that generally accompanies an alert shouldn’t trigger anxiety in anyone. With Lightstep’s latest announcement, we are taking some of the anxiety associated with alerting, or being on-call, and eliminating it. Unifying alerts, simplifying investigations, and meeting engineers where they live, will enable organizations to reduce downtime and improve their mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR), so that engineers can get back to doing what they love - building features. Want to see it in action - check out our sandboxsandbox or sign up for a demosign up for a demo.

Sravanthi Bio: Sravanthi specializes in customer research, usability, product management, cross-functional communications, and more. She has worked in product development in SaaS platforms over the last decade. When not in front of a computer, you can often find her spending time with her two curious and busy daughters.