Customers

InVision Improves Performance by 75% with LightStep [x]PM

InVision is the leading product design collaboration platform that powers the world’s best user experiences. Being in the business of delivering great user experiences to more than 4 million people means application reliability and performance are key. With distributed teams and distributed systems, pinpointing the root cause of performance issues was extremely difficult, if not impossible, with its existing Application Performance Management (APM) solution from New Relic. InVision needed full visibility across the distributed services to understand the root cause and get the right team engaged in resolving the situation. The team wanted a solution that would analyze 100 percent of the performance data. New Relic APM could not fulfill this need because its architecture forces it to sample at the host. Plus, its pricing model was cost prohibitive.

Today, 13 engineering teams at InVision have replaced New Relic APM with LightStep [x]PM, and they’ve reduced MTTR and costs as a result. Teams can more quickly identify the root cause of outages and incidents. Plus using [x]PM, they were able to improve the performance of one area of their software by 75%. "Building microservices at the scale of InVision leads to complex architectures. No one engineer has a complete map in their head of service-to-service interactions. It’s too complex and is constantly changing. We rely on LightStep [x]PM to help us visualize how our services are interacting and to pinpoint the root cause of performance issues." said Brady Kimball, Director of Engineering, InVision.

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Twilio Improves Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) by 92% with LightStep [x]PM

As an API company, Twilio’s software performance is synonymous with its brand. If a performance or reliability issue occurs in Twilio’s complex network of services, it’s a top priority to identify and mitigate that issue. The company needed to analyze all of its performance data without adding overhead, as well as get a macro view of all its system components. According to David Dunstan, Director of Insight Engineering, Twilio, “The challenge is finding those insights in large sets of data. With its ability to parse through high-cardinality data, LightStep [x]PM puts those data sets at our fingertips and has proven to be a critical technology deployment for us.” Using [x]PM, Twilio now has a speedy, optimized system with a 92% improvement in mean time to resolution for production issues. As SVP of Platform, Jason Hudak said, "[x]PM not only finds our performance problems, it tells us why they're happening. For example, within an hour of running [x]PM, our billing transactions team was able to identify issues and deliver improvements that led to a 70% reduction in latency."

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LightStep [x]PM Enables Lyft's Move to Microservices, Helping Drive Significant Revenue and Improving Product Performance

Lyft is a ridesharing company, based in San Francisco and launched in 2012, that develops and operates its own mobile transportation app. The smallest lapses – even a few milliseconds – contribute to negative customer experiences and lost revenue. With hundreds of microservices involved in daily transactions, performance management is as challenging as it is essential to Lyft’s user-facing product. LightStep [x]PM plays a critical role in helping Lyft minimize downtime and ensure that rider requests are fulfilled quickly and optimally routed. [x]PM helps Lyft meet its goals for system performance, reliability, and developer efficiency by providing a complete picture of the software system. It allows developers to investigate and resolve performance issues quickly and conduct efficient postmortems for outages. [x]PM connects the dots from mobile to the backend services. As Pete Morelli, VP of Engineering at Lyft, says, “LightStep is the future of monitoring and was instrumental in our move to microservices.”

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Yext Moves to LightStep [x]PM, Improving Application Performance

Yext’s enterprise customers want SaaS applications with fast response times and high availability. With the company’s rapid growth, its software systems are more complex and handle higher transaction volumes. Yext uses LightStep [x]PM to maintain a top 10 list of the slowest pages in its application and track their performance over time by monitoring and identifying root causes of incidents. “Using Graphite, we generate a list of the worst offenders and then save searches about them in [x]PM. Using [x]PM, we can access all information about those pages without any sampling. This top 10 list alerts us to issues that we may not have known about,” said Rob Figueiredo, Vice President of Engineering, Yext. “Getting the analytical clarity over time makes application remediation much more proactive. Without [x]PM, this work is painstaking and error prone, and it likely would have languished in the engineering team backlog for much longer too.”

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DigitalOcean Uses LightStep [x]PM as a Source of Truth for its Distributed System, Saving 1000 Hours of Developer Time per Month

With a global team and a multi-language microservices-based software architecture, DigitalOcean needed a source of truth for developers to see a complete, reliable picture of its system in real time. According to Dave Smith, Sr. Director of Engineering, DigitalOcean, “In our increasingly complex environment, it was impossible for a single person to understand the entire system. Root cause analysis was becoming difficult, and we couldn’t find an application performance monitoring system that was robust enough to work with our heterogeneity.” LightStep [x]PM not only acts as a connector for a distributed team, it also helps engineers work together and improve productivity. 100+ apps are now being monitored using [x]PM, and engineering teams have used the solution to measure and monitor specific apps and promote intra-company accountability and visibility. Smith summed up DigitalOcean’s experience with [x]PM: “It scales beautifully with our business and our use cases. We’re very pleased with our decision to standardize on it for application performance management.”

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