Lightstep Resources

Best practices for root cause analysis

Root cause analysis is about understanding not just what happened but why it happened. It’s about how our assumptions about a system or services are different from reality, so that fixes address the underlying cause instead of simply rolling back the latest deployment. This guide provides the best practices to effectively use root cause analysis to understand why an outage happened in the first place so that teams can prevent this from occurring in the future. You'll also learn how to: - Understand the context of a problem and learn from outages - Effectively and efficiently find the root cause of problems - Start root cause analysis with the right mindset

Take a look into the world of deep systems, observability, and distributed tracing

How to manage the hidden costs of Kubernetes

Kubernetes has enabled teams to realize the benefits of microservices — and deploying, scaling, and running distributed software at scale has never been easier. But these benefits come with significant costs. In this guide, we’ll discuss how to avoid major potential costs of Kubernetes: - 1,000s of hours spent fixing bugs - Spiraling monitoring costs - A lack of understanding of service dependencies

Observability’s ROI crisis: What broke and how we fix it

In this 1-hour webinar, you will discover: - The Observability Challenge – Why today’s software and cloud infrastructure architectures, based on Kubernetes-based microservices and containers, for example, create ‘deep systems’ complexity challenges to be addressed by operations - Impact on ROI – Consequences in terms of management, diagnosis, and resolution, and the resulting ROI gap for observability from both tooling and existing practice - A Way Forward – What steps to take initially, and over time, to enable the true worth of observability and performance management to take shape – separating high-quality telemetry from its (unified) analysis - Best Practice From The Field – Lessons learned from the field and real customer examples, to summarize what can be done to improve both efficiency and effectiveness Featured Speakers: - Ben Sigelman, CEO and Co-Founder, Lightstep - Jon Collins, Analyst, GigaOm Research

Ship fast and confidently with Lightstep and GitLab

As your services and applications continue to grow in complexity, it may feel like it is getting harder to ship fast and with confidence. There are new ways to mitigate the increasing complexity and accelerate cycle time. Adding observability to your code delivery process helps streamline issue detection and resolution — all while blending seamlessly into existing workflows. Come learn how you can use GitLab and Lightstep together to get your code up and running quickly and remain in control when things inevitably go sideways. We'll show how to: - Implement observability best practice - Architect a workflow to improve CI/CD workflow with GitLab and Lightstep - Identify and resolve issues quickly with reduced context switching between screens

Incident readiness, observability, & learning for production teams

Production team preparedness is more important than ever, so teams can mitigate risk to the business and scale to meet increasing demands for reliability and performance. But at the same time, it's also harder than ever, due to an explosion in systems complexity as well as fragmentation across siloed data, tools, and teams. In this webinar, you will learn pragmatic approaches to gain deep observability into distributed systems, as well as automate toil from the incident response and learning process to improve production readiness. Featured speakers: - Ancy Dow, Director of Product Marketing at Blamless - Parker Edwards, Sales Engineering Manager at Lightstep - Paul Chu, Sr. Sales Engineer at Blameless

Why modern systems require a new approach to observability

Observability is the most important capability needed to manage the development, deployment, and operation of modern systems. However, observability is not well understood and not necessarily well supported by many existing tools. Join Spoons, CTO and Cofounder of Lightstep and Steve Hendrick, Research Director at IT analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), for a discussion on the importance of observability and how to address this capability for complex systems. Attend and learn: - What observability is - Why observability is critically relevant - The organizational benefits observability provides - How enterprises should evaluate their deep system readiness

Oncall or not oncall? Using distributed tracing to improve reliability and performance

Microservices and other loosely coupled architectures create a new set of challenges for engineers who are responsible for reliability and performance: not only is the performance of each service important on its own, but understanding the way services interact is also a critical part of improving end-user experience. And while adopting DevOps practices creates tighter feedback loops between teams and their users, it often makes it more difficult to catch performance issues before they are pushed to production. Whether you're oncall or not, you need to understand dependencies between services and the role each service plays in handling requests. In this presentation, we'll show how distributed tracing provides context that can: - Map out dependencies in ways that are specific to each type of request - Quickly connect changes in service level indicators (SLIs) back to their root causes - Make sure that alerts are delivered to teams that are best positioned to address them - Catch performance regressions earlier in your deployment pipeline - Inform performance optimization work so you are making the best use of your time We'll also talk about the steps you need to take to leverage distributed tracing for your application and your organization, including when and how to instrument your code and how to manage the costs of your observability solution as a whole.

An engineering leader’s guide to OpenTelemetry

Curious about OpenTelemetry and how it can help your team? Read this guide to learn the importance of telemetry in applications, why an open source and vendor-neutral approach is critical, why OpenTelemetry is the best choice for organizations, and more.