Stepping it up! Lightstep feature updates - July 2021

Read all about the new features and enhancements that Lightstep has delivered in the last few months.

Configure high availability for your Prometheus metrics

If you use the Prometheus sidecarPrometheus sidecar to ingest metrics, you can now configure the sidecar specifically for a High Availability (HA) environment. You can attach a sidecarattach a sidecar to each replica and then configure one of the sidecars to be the “leader” using the Kubernetes Coordination API.

Tip: Before enabling the --leader-election.enabled flag in the sidecar, ensure that there is a service account for Prometheus in Kubernetes and then bind the role permissions to that service account.

Read about the sidecar and configuration options, including HA, herehere.

Create Notebooks for your investigation

When you are in a metrics performance investigation, you often need to run ad hoc queries and share findings with your team. Instead of creating "throw-away" dashboards, Lightstep provides NotebooksNotebooks that allow you to create queries on the fly, add text blocks, and share with anyone with a Lightstep account.

Metric charts in a Notebook behave the same as chartscharts in a dashboard. You use the query builder to create the chart and filter the data. You can also run Change IntelligenceChange Intelligence directly from a Notebook.

Send Google Cloud metrics to Lightstep

You can now send metrics (including any custom metrics) to Lightstep from Google Cloud MonitoringGoogle Cloud Monitoring.

You will need to create a service account, grant Lightstep access to the account, and finally contact your technical account manager to complete the integration.

Use the OpenTelemetry Protocol to send metric data to Lightstep

You can send metrics to Lightstep using the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP)OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP). This protocol was designed as a format to support both StatsD and Prometheus style metrics exposition for reporting to backend systems.

If you are interested in experimenting with the latest from OpenTelemetry, you can also use either the CollectorCollector or the SDKSDK.

Note: This protocol and specification are still under development, so there may be features that are unsupported by Lightstep. Please refer to this pagethis page for the most up-to-date information about our OpenTelemetry Protocol support.

Lightstep Glossary

The Learning Portal now includes a glossary to help you learn the terms you need to understand and use Lightstep. Check it out!Check it out!

View metrics reporting to a project and edit details

You can view all metrics reporting to a project from the Project Settings page. A table displays each metric in a row, along with its associated metadata and other details.

Lightstep uses that metadata in the UI to provide context in the metric charts. For example, you can see the units for a metric from a tooltip in the chart and also in the corresponding tables.

You can view, add, and change a metric’s details from the Project SettingsProject Settings page or directly from a chart.