Lightstep is now free for developers

In my role as Lightstep's developer advocate, I spend a lot of time talking to developers about tracing and observability. One thing I’ve noticed in these conversations is that while a lot of systems look pretty different, we all have pretty similar problems that boil down to one real problem: understanding, or a lack thereof. The only actual constant is change; these changes can be things you can control, like deploying new code or configuration, or things you can’t, like increases in external traffic, security patches, and more. At Lightstep, we’re committed to building tools that help you answer this question of “What changed?” -- both through our investments in community observability frameworks like OpenTelemetry, as well as through our product itself.

OpenTelemetry is already a game changer for application and service monitoring, by providing an open source and vendor neutral API, SDK, and tooling for the generation of telemetry -- metrics, logs, and traces -- it’s one of the most popular projectsmost popular projects in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, second only to Kubernetes. I frequently encounter developers who want to get started using OpenTelemetry, either by contributing to the community via writing instrumentation plugins for frameworks and applications, or experimenting with their own services by integrating OpenTelemetry into them. Integration with OpenTelemetry, however, is only half the battle - once you’ve got that data, you need to send it somewhere.

Obviously, I’d like for you to send it to Lightstepsend it to Lightstep.

Lightstep Community Tier

We’re making that easier than ever, starting today. I’d like to introduce you to the Lightstep Community plan. We’re offering everyone the world’s best distributed tracing analysis tool for free, for as many services as you have. You can send us up to 100GB of trace data a month, and invite two of your teammates to collaborate in the SaaS platform. Maybe you’re trying to get started with OpenTelemetry in your development environment and don’t want to set up Jaeger or Zipkin -- just send your data to Lightstep, we’ll help you analyze and interpret it. Do you have a personal project that you’d like to monitor? No problem - just add OpenTelemetry (or any of our other supported tracerssupported tracers) and you’re good to go. If you have questions, run into problems, or just want to chat about observability, we’ve launched a community Discord server community Discord server that you can join and connect with other Lightstep users.

Why are we doing this?

Honestly, it’s because I want as many people as possible to start to understand the power and value of observability tools - and the best way to show that off, I think, is by just giving it to you for free.

We’re not stopping there, though! If you’re trying to roll out distributed tracing in production, you have to make a lot of decisions on how to collect, store, and analyze those traces. We want to make it easier, and cheaper, so we’re revamping our Pro plan. For just $100 per logical service per month, you can send unlimited trace data to the Lightstep platform and benefit from community support. Of course, if you have more complex needs or require on-premises deployments of Lightstep, we can support that through our Enterprise plans as usual.

The only question left to ask, then, is why haven’t you started using Lightstep? You can get started in just one minutejust one minute, so pick the best plan for you and sign up todaypick the best plan for you and sign up today!