Wow, Metrics! How do I send them to Lightstep?

We are extremely excited to share our approach to quickly identifying changes and abnormalities using Lightstep’s new Change IntelligenceChange Intelligence feature. In order to take advantage of these new features, you’ll first want to start sending us metrics.

A Lightstep Sales EngineerSales Engineer can help navigate the specifics of telemetry ingestion, but here are some helpful tips to jump start that conversation.

Do you already have a Metrics solution?

If so, we can tap into it! If you have an existing metrics solution, you can evaluate our new features such as Change Intelligence by sending your production metrics both to Lighstep and your existing solution. In this release, we've made it easy to have a seamless transition from two of the most common metrics solutions, Prometheus and Datadog, with more being added in coming releases.

Prometheus

While Prometheus is commonly used for metrics monitoring, it cannot provide insight on tracesit cannot provide insight on traces and provide the full context of an alert. If you have an existing Prometheus setup, we’ve contributed the Prometheus sidecar to OpenTelemetry to send any metrics and related metadata to Lightstep. This is an easy way to get that same data into Lightstep with minimal changes.

To get started, follow the step-by-step guide in our documentation.step-by-step guide in our documentation.

Datadog

Datadog is another common monitoring solution and while it has many features, it is missing the automated analysismissing the automated analysis that narrows the search space during an incident. If you are a Datadog user, you can integrate with Lightstep via the Datadog AgentLightstep via the Datadog Agent. This can be particularly helpful if you’ve already set up dashboards with custom metrics, as we can easily migrate those dashboards and metrics to Lightstep.

"Lightstep shows us exactly where things are slow, what changes we need to make to realize a quick ROI, and specifically how our customers are experiencing our platform." –Philip Zeyliger, Software Engineer at Airtable

Other Solutions

Beyond an easy migration from these two existing solutions, the OpenTelemetry project standardizes and makes compatible dataOpenTelemetry project standardizes and makes compatible data from multiple observability vendors. This gives teams additional flexibility in choosing reporting, dashboarding, and analytics tools. We are leading the metrics effort and holding discussions in the OpenTelemetry community bringing together major technology companies, observability vendors, and existing open source metrics communities. If you are interested in exploring and collaborating on what the future of OpenTelemetry could look like for your organization, come talk to us!

Are you just getting started with metrics?

Integrating Lightstep with your Cloud Provider is the easy way to get started. For teams that are newly embarking on a metrics journey, we recommend starting simple. If you’re running AWS, by simply configuring a roleby simply configuring a role, Lightstep can retrieve metrics directly. Our customer success team is also a great resource and partner for how to make the most of your metrics.

Metrics in OpenTelemetry

Our teams are constantly thinking about how to make observability easy and impactful and we believe OpenTelemetry is a major part of that equation. The diverse perspectives from various vendors that come together in this community push us to be transparent and think holistically. There’s a lot more work that needs to be done and if you’re interested in participating or following along, we encourage you to joinwe encourage you to join!

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