Stepping It Up! Lightstep Feature Updates - January 2020

We had a major milestone release with our new Service Health for Deployments feature that allows you to easily see if a deployment may have affected service performance and then drill down to find the cause. You can read all about that here, as well as all the other great stuff we’ve released since November.

Service Health for Deployments

You know that it’s always a risk when you deploy, no matter how small the change or how well it’s been tested. But with our Service Health for Deployments feature, at least you’ll know about any regressions right away.

Here’s how your deployments are marked for a service. In this example, you can see that there was a regression directly after the deploy. 

You can compare the performance during the spike with the baseline performance. You can compare histograms, tag correlations, and operation diagrams, as well as spanspan and trace data. Everything you need to find that cause is right at your fingertips.

Read the blog posblog pos for all the details.

New Time-Based Workflow Variables

We've added four time-based Workflow variablesWorkflow variables you can use to base your links on the time a span ended. For example, you might want to create a link to logs that end five minutes after the span’s timestamp.

Here are the new variables:

• $endTimeMillis-5min: Five minutes before the span's end time in milliseconds

• $endTimeMillis+5min: Five minutes after the span's end time in milliseconds

• $endTimeMillis-1hr: One hour before the span's end time in milliseconds

• $endTimeMillis+1hr: One hour after the span's end time in milliseconds

Email Notifications

The Measure Your Instrumentation QualityMeasure Your Instrumentation Quality feature in Lightstep shows you how well your services are instrumented for distributed tracing and offers suggestions on how to make them better. 

Now, those suggestions will be emailed to you, giving you a quick heads-up when your services need a little TLC.

You're enrolled into these emails by default and you can manage your subscription from the Account Settings page.

More Auto-Instrumentation

Now adding instrumentation to your system is quicker and easier with our release of Auto-InstallersAuto-Installers! Like the OpenTracing Java SpecialAgentJava SpecialAgent, when you install and configure these Auto-Installers, any supported libraries currently used in your system become automatically instrumented for distributed tracing. You can get data into Lightstep without having to add multiple lines of code to all your services.

These new Auto-Installers are available for the following:

• .Net.Net

• NodeJSNodeJS

• PythonPython

• RubyRuby

They support commonly used libraries, like HTTP requests, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, and Redis. If you're already using libraries like these, then you are just one step away from instrumentation!

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