Stepping it up! Lightstep feature updates - October and November 2020

Control the Attributes the Instrumentation Quality Score Uses

As part of the Instrumentation QualityInstrumentation Quality score, Lightstep automatically checks for specific attributes because they help Lightstep do its job better (for example, the host.name attribute lets you know where the service lives and the span.kind attribute determines service boundaries). Now, for the Custom span and the new Environment attributes scores, you can control which attributes Lightstep should look for when scoring your instrumentation.

For example, if you want every span to have a customer and k8s.cluster.name attribute reporting to Lightstep, you can register them, and Lightstep takes their absence or presence into account when determining the score. This is a great way to ensure all services are sending data that’s important to your business. Read the latest blog herelatest blog here.

Using a Git SHA for Deployment Markers

If you’re using GitLab or GitHub for your project, you can use a Git SHA provided by the CI system as the service.version attribute when creating a deployment markerdeployment marker so you can easily connect your traces with specific commits of code.

Here’s an example Skaffold configuration file that builds a Docker container using the GITHUB_SHA environment variable:

- image: productcatalogservice
  Context: src/productcatalogservice
  docker:
    buildArgs:
      SERVICE_VERSION: "{{.GITHUB_SHA}}"

Learn how to use it with our Deployments Learning PathDeployments Learning Path.

Improved Learning Path for Monitoring Deployments

We’ve updated the Monitoring DeploymentsMonitoring Deployments Learning Path. It now shows you how to compare performance after a deploy with performance after a previous deploy and makes it even easier to find the source of the regression. Also, we cut the time to complete in half!

New Endpoints and Rate Limits in Our Public API

We’ve added endpoints to our Public APIPublic API to help you build better integrations into your custom internal tools and third-party applications.

Snapshots

• Get Service Diagram DataService Diagram Data

• Get Trace Data for SnapshotsTrace Data for Snapshots

• Get list of Snapshot IDsSnapshot IDs

Key Operations

• Post Key Ops programmatically per ServiceKey Ops programmatically per Service

• Get Key Ops Time series DataKey Ops Time series Data

Services

• Get Reporting Status DataReporting Status Data

• Get Operations level SLI DataOperations level SLI Data

Alerts

• Create Alerts for any combination of Conditions (Alerts)Conditions (Alerts) and Destination IDs (AlertingRules)Destination IDs (AlertingRules)

Rate Limit Changes

We’ve also updated the rate limiting for API requests. All endpoints except the following allow 100 requests per second per organization, in aggregate.

The following rate limits are per organization, based on your pricing plan.

• Snapshots API

  • Community: 10 per hour

  • Professional: 30 per hour

  • Enterprise: 60 per hour

• Key Operations Time Series

  • Community: 60 per hour

  • Professional: 200 per hour

  • Enterprise: 600 per hour

• Streams Time Series

  • Community: 60 per hour

  • Professional: 200 per hour

  • Enterprise: 600 per hour

Updates to Streams and User Tables

It’s now easier for large organizations to manage their StreamsStreams and usersusers. The Streams table now shows the last date that the Stream received data from the Satellites, making it easy to determine when you can delete a Stream.

You can also now see when any user last logged in.

And both tables now support deleting multiple rows at once.

Lightstep Plugin for Grafana Updated

We’ve updated our plugin for Grafanaplugin for Grafana to work with their latest release. Once installed and configured, the plugin allows you to view Lightstep Streams in Grafana charts. You can click on any exemplar in the chart to navigate directly to the trace view and start your investigation in Lightstep.

Use Lightstep and Gremlin in a Chaos Experiment

Lightstep has developed an SDK that allows you to create Gremlin chaos experiments automatically using observability data found in Lightstep. Gremlin provides tools to inject failure into your systems to target weaknesses. But how do you know what to target? The observability that Lightstep gives you can help you answer that question. Using its tracing data, you can scale attacks to target not just one service, but all dependencies up and down the stack, simulating cascading latency and errors across an application.

And once you’ve configured Gremlin to create the attack (based on information that Lightstep has provided), you can use Lightstep to quickly find the issues that start occurring.

Learn how to use it herehere.

Lightstep Pre-Deploy Check GitHub Action

Lightstep developed a Pre-Deploy GitHub action that checks the system health of the current environment whenever a GitHub pull request is submitted. It lets you know if there are any latency, error rate, or operation rate issues so you can investigate and if needed, resolve before a deploy.

The Lightstep Pre-Deploy Check action uses the Lightstep API to get all alerts that currently exist for your Streams and, if any are violated, provides a link that allows you to see the violation in Lightstep.

If your system also uses Rollbar, you can add an integration to the action and see error information from Rollbar along with a link into Rollbar for more information.

If your system uses PagerDuty, you can integrate it into the action to include “who’s on-call” information for the service associated with the GitHub repository.

Check out our Learning PathLearning Path to find out more!

Interested in joining our team? See our open positions herehere.