ServiceNow Cloud Observability (formerly LightStep) Pros and Cons

When we first introduced Lightstep instrumentation quality dashboard proved to be very useful in guiding us towards better observability.

The visibility of information is top-notch, many issues which existed in our system for a very long time became obvious and we had immediate action points on how to solve them. Identifying problems and root causes became very easy and fast.

Also, a comparison of current and previous releases is very valuable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

UX and UI are not on the same level as the feature set. There are many small improvements which can make this product much more useful. Some examples: Grafana has better looking tracing graphs components, Kibana has an excellent feature for quickly adding conditions from everywhere possible (+/- buttons), ... Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

For micro-service architectures, Lightstep is the de-facto distributed tracing tool that allow DevOps teams to quickly pinpoint regressions down to a specific method call in less than a minute. No more slogging through logs to get errors and context about issues. I can send a developer a link to a Lightstep error trace and know they have enough information to fix a bug or instrument their tracing better on the next build to help solve the issue. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Lightstep's metadata filtering/grouping is one of its strongest features, however grouping is currently limited to one piece of metadata and I wish there were ways to group by multiple pieces of metadata in a single results set. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the streams in lightstep, it provides easy to navigate UI through data/graphs, and hence gives easy access to all kinds of analysis of data needed. Also how it can be set up for alerting also helped our team to have a better insights on health of our software. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I didn like how the stream started to lose information once more than a certain number of calls were reached. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The user interface is very intuitive. Lightstep provides a lot of features that will help you notice a problem or suboptimal solution in the production. It helped us to mitigate some problems, and thus improve the experience of our users. Their support and provided training and demos were really helpful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's very difficult to estimate how many resources do you need for satellites (collectors) pool because you don't know how they really work and how they use provided memory. Documentation is not clear enough about their setup. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Focus on (and contribution to) open standards for observability.

Easy integration for many stacks.

Intuitive, well designed dashboard(s) to work with the data, with instant value through predefined views and graphs.

Continuous improvement in new releases. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not so much as to dislike, but the documentation and tooling (mainly in form of IaC) for Satellite deployment can be much better. There is a lot of figure it out on your own to setup an optimum, elastic Satellite system. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Lightstep gives me confidence in my running applications. It provides insight into what was previously a black box. When performance degrades or I need to dig deeper, Lightstep gives me the tools I need to get the job done. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Lightstep is still new! That means there are many features that they are iterating and working on that I would love, like correlation analysis on streams. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

They open source their libraries and which made it easy to identify a performance issue, submit a PR, and get an updated library with a quick turn around. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

They have a tremendous amount of data, and I expect it to take some time to put together. I wish were quicker though when I'm facing an issue. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like how it breaks down traces into sections, which makes it really useful for seeing where my latency is coming from. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I have found it pretty difficult fo find metrics that I want. I haven't found the search tools that helpful. I don't find it very intuitive to find traces for specific endpoints. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Set of features, easy to investigate and fix performance issues Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

UX/UI. Sometimes it is hard to find what i want Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Reliable and works well. Something I know I can depend on. Would recommend. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sometimes it can be a bit slow and the interface could use some improvement Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.