Stepping It Up! Lightstep Feature Updates – October 2019

Sure, we’re big on new features — like easy migration from ZipkinZipkin and JaegerJaeger, Instrumentation ScoringInstrumentation Scoring, and Workflow LinksWorkflow Links — but we’re also improving Lightstep by pushing small improvements all the time, many of them based on your feedback.

Here’s what’s new in October.

Filtering from the Service Diagram

Ever use the Service Diagram and immediately see where your issue might be? That’s great, but then you had to go back to the Trace Analysis table and figure out how to filter your results. Now you can filter query results directly from the Service Diagram’s side panel!

Click the filter icon to filter by operations on the queried service. Or, when you spot an issue further down the stack, select another service and filter on that service or its operations. Now instead of seeing only spans that match your query in the table, Lightstep returns all spans from your query’s traces, and then filters the results, based on what you selected.

Service Diagram Controls

You may have also noticed that the controls to change the Service Diagram have improved as well. They are now above the diagram and out of your way.

New Streams Workflow

You asked — we listened! Many of you wondered why you couldn’t create Streams directly from the Streams page. Well, now you can! Plus, we improved the entire workflow so it’s easier to create streams from the Service Directory for a service or operation.

Create Stream Dialog

We’ve added the query functionality from Explorer to the Streams View and Service Directory. You no longer need to change your view to run a query for your Stream.

Updated Stream List

We not only added the ability to create Streams from the Stream list view, we also updated the page to improve management of your Streams. Search, rename, or delete Streams — or even run a real-time query in Explorer, right from the main page.

Stream Management from the Service Directory

You can now more easily manage Streams from the Service Directory. We’ve updated the Operations tab to make viewing and creating operation Streams easier to find.

And we updated the Streams tab to be more intuitive as well. Everything you can do on the Streams page (create, edit, rename, delete, run a query), you can do from here as well.

Share Previews of Histograms and Streams in Slack

We know you were happy when you could drop a Trace URL into Slack and see all the details (not just a link). Well now you can now do the same with the Explorer histogram and Streams!. Copy a link to a specific Explorer queryExplorer query, Trace ViewTrace View page, or StreamStream, post it into any Slack channel in your workspace, and all the pertinent info from that page displays in the Slack channel.

Here’s a preview of a histogram from the Explorer view:

And here’s a preview from the Trace view:

And lastly, here’s a preview of a Stream:

And if you just want to share the URL (through email or other service), we now give you shortened URLs so they don’t take up half your message 😁.

That’s it for this month. Look for more updates in November!

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