Strengthening our commitment to the OpenTelemetry project 

Lightstep believes in the power of open-source software to fuel cloud innovation and digital transformation. Every day, our collective dependence on software—to power our economies, to keep us connected and to simplify and improve our daily lives—grows deeper and more complex. And yet that software, while increasingly essential, is often fragile and poorly understood. So, we’re putting the power back in our customers’ hands.  

Starting today, Lightstep is the first company that natively provides customers with complete control of their telemetry pipeline using OpenTelemetry, which saves time and money, and provides the freedom to innovate at scale. By embracing OpenTelemetry support without vendor lock-in, we help you make complex app development easier and faster.  

In addition, we’re upstreaming any advancements to our microsatellites to the OpenTelemetry Collector and will continue development efforts on the OpenTelemetry Collector. 

In addition, we’re announcing an industry-first commitment to open source and upstream all OpenTelemetry enhancements generated from the Lightstep Engineering team.  

What does this mean for Lightstep customers? 

Open-source projects like OpenTelemetry benefit the entire development community with a common framework for collecting telemetry data. By offering native support for end-to-end OpenTelemetry tooling, site reliability engineers (SREs) and developers can seamlessly migrate their telemetry data into the Lightstep platform and eliminate the need for vendor-specific tooling and skillsets.  

For customers who have been using end-to-end OpenTelemetry to send their data to Lightstep, the impact of this announcement is limited. You can continue sending your data to Lightstep the way you have been with no changes.  
 
For customers who are leveraging the Lightstep Microsatellite architecture, this announcement allows you to remove our own vendor-specific technology from your data pipeline. Customers on our microsatellite architecture can replace the microsatellite with the OpenTelemetry Collector and continue to send their data to Lightstep.  

For Lightstep customers using Lightstep Launchers, you can use the relevant language framework in place of the Launchers. We've worked to bring the language frameworks to a higher standard and have achieved parity plus with the existing language frameworks.   

We still fundamentally believe in making SDK configuration simple, but the right location for a solution and ongoing language agnostic configuration is through the community. Whether it’s as a repo maintainer, approver, technical / governance committee member, or regular contributor, we’re continuing to invest in developing these frameworks alongside the community.  

For Lightstep prospects if you’re using OpenTelemetry natively within your ecosystem and want to try Lightstep, it’s easier than ever to get started.Simply create a free-for-life accountfree-for-life account and send your data to Lightstep.  

What’s next? 

It’s in everyone’s best interest to give back and share knowledge that can help improve OpenTelemetry and the entire software ecosystem. That’s why we’re committing to open source all previous and future OpenTelemetry enhancements generated by the Lightstep engineering team. This will help continuously improve OpenTelemetry for the entire industry and advance open-source software as a vehicle for cloud innovation.  

A recent survey conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) found that the percentage of organizations that prefer a vendor-agnostic approach to open-source software purchases increased from 14% in 2022 to 36% in 2023.

“IT leaders remain wary of vendor lock-in, as a dependence on a single vendor for support and upgrades can limit options in the future,” wrote Paul Nashawaty, principal analyst at ESG.¹

By embracing OpenTelemetry support without vendor lock-in, the future of complex app development can become easier and faster. And with ServiceNow’s platform and Lightstep observability, you can harness a modern suite of solutions to help software engineers and technologists break down organizational silos and increase productivity, agility, and resiliency. And that is the cornerstone of of successful digital business models.