Save, share, and collaborate with Lightstep

How often are you going through a process (resolving an issue, investigating a change, completing a postmortem), and you’re relying on a document (or ticketing system) on one screen, and dashboards or charts of your investigation on another, copying/pasting content from one to the other? Every click and drag to capture a screenshot, of a chart you already created, is just driving you crazy. Surely, there is an easier way to share your findings. Also, what if you wanted to do this collaboratively with someone on your team who knows this service better than you? How?

Lightstep has now made it even easier to enable our users to share Notebooks, or postmortems, and collaborate with their peers.

Notebook snapshots

Sharing your investigative workflow, and troubleshooting steps, is the easiest way to broadcast to your team, leadership, or stakeholders the work that goes into resolving a high-priority outage. A notebook snapshot is the easiest way to do that. Within Lightstep there are a couple different “flavors” on how to share a notebook - collaboratively or read-only.

When you share a notebook collaboratively, you are inviting the rest of your team to jump in and help you investigate or report on your findings. The best time to do this is early in your investigative flow. Sharing and working alongside your team helps you resolve issues faster. When you’re sharing a collaborative – or live – notebook, you and your team can add in charts or text blocks, modify time ranges, and change queries.

The other option within NotebooksNotebooks, is the ability to share a read-only snapshot. A read-only snapshot removes the ability to collaborate, but still allows team members to view the steps of your investigation. This is best when you need to report out to external stakeholders (think cloud vendor or 3rd party integration), or when you need to report out to the business who may not have a Lightstep login.

Lightstep also lists out all the read-only snapshots that have been created for a particular Notebook. This is incredibly useful when you want to keep track of your investigation, what you have shared with your team and when. You can always refer back to your investigative steps, and share learnings with your team introducing a culture of learning within your organization.

Sharing a postmortem

Lightstep also offers the same ability to share a postmortem with additional details. Within Lightstep Incident Response, once an incident is resolved the focus of the team can turn to the postmortem to figure out what happened, why it happened, and what they are going to do to prevent it from happening again. For more information, check out this post specifically about Lightstep Incident ResponseLightstep Incident Response postmortems. Lightstep auto-populates fields, and offers a template, and best practices on how to share your findings:

• Autopopulated exec summary

• Customer service impact

• Incident timeline

• Detailed summary

• Action items (actions to fix the root cause from happening again)

Lightstep’s latest update to its Incident Response platform provides teams with the ability to share information in-context of an incident, and kick off live collaboration channels to discuss what happened between all of the responders on that incident

Collaboration - made easy

Whether you’re working with a large team and want to collaboratively investigate an issue, or sharing your findings with a 3rd party, during or after an incident - Lightstep has made it easy for you to report out on your team’s efforts. Incidents are an opportunity to learn more about your system, understand dependencies, and identify areas to proactively improve your environment. With Lightstep, you can create a library of knowledge of past events to share with your team to make your software more reliable and resilient - which is kind of the goal.