LightStep Newsroom

Tracing Down a Root Cause with LightStep Tracing

by Ken Nalbone(@KenNalbone)

New application architectures require a new approach to monitoring and troubleshooting. When a transaction occurs, following the path it takes from beginning to end is necessary in order to understand application behavior. The transformation of application development and architectures and the need for improved observability and monitoring has given birth to a new class of product and even entirely new companies focused on solving this problem. Read more >

LightStep Unfurls Dynamic Tracing Service

by Mike Vizard(@mvizard)

LightStep announced a stand-alone dynamic tracing tools capability that visualizes patterns in code based on 100 percent of the data available. LightStep Tracing differs from other approaches to tracing because it does not rely on a small sample of data that usually doesn’t wind up providing much actionable insight. Within minutes, LightStep Tracing can be employed to instrument and visualize service-to-service interactions across web, mobile, microservices, serverless and monolithic applications. Read more >

Recommendations When Starting with Microservices: Ben Sigelman at QCon London

by Jan Stenberg(@janstenberg)

During the years Ben Sigelman worked at Google, they were creating what we today call a microservices architecture. Mistakes were made during this adoption which he believes are being repeated today by the rest of the industry. In a presentation at QCon London 2019, Sigelman described his recommendations to avoid making these mistakes when starting with microservices. Read more >

LightStep Adds Distributed Tracing For All

by Justin Warren(@jpwarren)

LightStep Tracing aggregates information from the raw trace data it collects to identify trends and correlations that are difficult to find when manually inspecting individual traces. This helps developers and operators to rapidly detect anomalous behavior and locate its actual cause, rather than wasting time chasing down and eliminating many possible causes. Read more >

Three Pillars with Zero Answers: Rethinking Observability with Ben Sigelman

by Daniel Bryant(@danielbryantuk)

At KubeCon NA, held in Seattle, USA, in December 2018, Ben Sigelman presented "Three Pillars, Zero Answers: We Need to Rethink Observability" and argued that many organisations may need to rethink their approach to metrics, logging and distributed tracing. Setting business-level goals and requirements in relation to observability is vitally important, as is being clear about the strengths, weaknesses and tradeoffs being made with any tooling solution. Observability tooling should be able to assist with detecting issues that are user experience-impacting, and should also help with refining the search space where the associated problem or root cause lurks. Read more >

The Kubernetes startups we’re watching in 2019

by R. Danes(@SiliconANGLE)

An impressive circle of companies has sprung up to make enterprise-grade Kubernetes deployment easier. Some solve security issues, while others provide microservices monitoring, and others still offer Kubernetes as a service. Two former engineers for Google LLC, the birthplace of Kubernetes, founded LightStep Inc. for monitoring the service mesh, a layer for managing communication and traffic across Kubernetes clusters. Its customer base includes DigitalOcean Inc., Lyft Technologies Inc., Twilio Inc. and Microsoft Corp.-owned GitHub. Read more >

LightStep picks up $41M for its container-friendly monitoring platform

by Maria Deutscher(@SiliconANGLE)

LightStep Inc., an application monitoring startup founded by two former Google LLC engineers, today announced that it has raised a $41 million funding round to fuel its growth. Uber Technologies Inc. backer Altimeter Capital led the investment with participation from Sequoia Capital, Redpoint Ventures and others. The round, LightStep’s third to date, brings its total outside capital to $71 million. Read more >

APM needs to change to keep up with continuous development practices

by Jenna Sargent(@jsargey)

Specifically, breaking up applications into microservices or serverless tends to increase the volume of data coming out of those applications. APM tools will need to be able to scale and accommodate that increase in data volume in order to maintain the same level of visibility. Read more >

Gartner Names 5 Cool Vendors in Performance Analysis, 2018

by Timothy King(@BigData_Review)

Gartner's Cool Vendors in Performance Analysis; Analytics and Containers zones in on startups that offer some disruptive capability or opportunity. Gartner says that cool vendors “exist across all major areas of technology and innovation” and CIOs that pay close attention to these trends can avoid the “disadvantage in trying to keep up.” Read more >

How, and when, to deploy serverless

by B. Cameron Gain(@brucegain)

People deploying serverless technology often restrict their thinking to the small piece of code behind serverless function, leaving the operational realities of maintaining and understanding that code as a literal afterthought. In a production environment, and especially during a fire, this can lead to great difficulties with root-cause analysis and debugging. Read more >